The Might of Names in Writing and Real Life

More and more I write fiction by first entering a meditative state and imagining each scene in my mind like a film. Next, I take to my laptop, typing until the mental images are spent. Then I repeat the process. 

(The 7 Rules of Picking Names for Fictional Characters.)

In the early drafts of my latest novel, Sing, I, many of these transcribed scenes depicted a secondary character, Nikki. Nikki was a thinly-veiled version of Nicole, a friend and San Francisco Bay Area singer and musician who died more than a decade ago. As hard as I tried to bring Nikki to life on the page as someone both in memory of and separate to Nicole, she insisted on remaining true to the identity of her real-life inspiration. A mirroring, as it turned out, that did not suit the story my novel existed to tell. 

It wasn’t until I changed Nikki’s name to Lily that I freed the character from the limits I’d inadvertently placed on her and allowed her to organically reveal herself and her story. The powerful results from her name change impressed on me once again the mysteries to writing and the alchemy to names.

I revisited every other name in Sing, I, including its title, chapter titles, and place names, to ensure I’d gotten them right. I especially examined my choice to name the main character Ester Prynn—a near namesake to Hester Prynne, the protagonist in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Because I’ve long hated my own name, also a namesake, I knew firsthand the wealth of tension such a layered moniker could evoke. Plus, the allusion to The Scarlet Letter underscored Sing, I’s themes of guilt, shame, othering, and patriarchy. But was this another instance where my inserting a trope too close to my lived experience didn’t serve the story? 

I continued revising the novel with an open imagination, willing to change my protagonist’s name if needed. Happily, the weight and import of Ester Prynn’s name proved essential to her character and her story. Moreover, I credit the writing of Sing, I, and in particular Ester’s evolutionary relationship to herself, with shifting my negative perspective on my own name.

Check out Ethel Rohan’s Sing, I here:

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Growing up in nationalist Ireland, in a working-class north Dublin neighborhood, the unusual name of Ethel coupled with its English origins subjected me to constant and often cruel attention. My mother almost named me Celine, but worried people would nickname me silly. Christened Ethel Celine, I heard in my head Ethel Silly. My mother placed emphasis on my being named after her great aunt and my great-great aunt. From which I intuited pressure to be better than I was. Ethel also means noble. Cue more duress. 

In stark contrast to such lofty associations, I was nicknamed Nettle and Kettle by the local boys. There were also countless references to random grannies named Ethel, Ethel from I Love Lucy, and Ethel the Elephant, whoever she was. I reached a point in my teens where whenever someone said my name, especially at volume, I flinched. It is not hyperbole then to say that I found Ester Prynn’s journey of self-empowerment over the course of Sing, I life-changing. Inspired by Ester, and by several more of the novel’s characters who came to embrace every facet of themselves, I reclaimed my name from those I had allowed to twist and devalue it, myself included, and have since refashioned it into a name with positive and potent properties.

Because I’m now obsessing on writers as serial name givers, I reached out to other authors on the topic and am pleased to share below brief takes from Katie M. Flynn, R. O. Kwon, Manjula Martin, Sasha Vasilyuk, and Brandi Wells on the power and consequences of names, naming, and withholding names.

Katie M. Flynn, author of Island Rule, Scout Press, March 2024

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In my interconnected short story collection, Island Rule, some characters are never referred to by their names, but rather by their roles in the lives of others or by a quality perceived as defining. For example, in the story “Us, Being the Org, Being Us,” the narrator refers to her partner exclusively as “My Boyfriend.” This metonymy reflects how she thinks of him, solely in relation to herself. 

I like to accentuate this reductive way of perceiving others through capitalization, as in the case of another story in the collection, “The Single Friend.” At a dinner party, the narrator of this story hears an old friend refer to her as “you know, the Single Friend.” It has become her defining quality, “the one who prefers to be alone,” and the name sticks. It sticks so hard that it becomes a prison the narrator can’t escape. It’s fascinating, and edifying, this determining power of naming and not naming.

R. O. Kwon, author of Exhibit, Riverhead Books, May 2024

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I write under a different name than I use elsewhere. With the writing I publish, I’m R. O. Kwon. I’m Okyong to my parents and some Korean relatives, and Reese otherwise. The writing-related split came about because Reese is a nickname, and, though I’d have loved to publish as Okyong, it’s not a name most non-Koreans can pronounce. Nor is it a question of will: Even people I love who have known me for years can’t get “Okyong” right, which makes sense. There’s plenty in other languages I can’t pronounce. 

It’s also true that, when I’m writing, if I’m really in it, I don’t entirely feel that it’s coming from me. I feel closer to being a medium, asking—and often begging—a novel to trust me enough to let me try to put its life into words. I appreciate having a separate name under which I can publish anything so inherently mysterious and bewildering and not quite mine as a book.

Manjula Martin, author of The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History, Pantheon Books, January 2024

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The name of my latest book, The Last Fire Season, came to me easily and early. Because my own birth name has a somewhat complex backstory, I like a name that resonates without explanation, but also has the potential to carry deeper meanings. The Last Fire Season, for me, does that. The title references the fact that, because of climate change, there is no longer a distinct fire season. In the Western US, it is now called a fire year. But the title is less a pun on fire terminology and more of a challenge. It questions a worldview in which the current mega-fires are easily categorized as anomalous events or temporal disasters. In fact, fire is not seasonal. It’s ever present and foundational, in both the natural and human world (which are the same things). My book is in part about how I came to understand that.

The most difficult part of naming my book was actually the subtitle. Subtitles are de rigueur in nonfiction. They’re important marketing tools, a way to embed keywords and search terms in a book’s online presence. I have found my book to be difficult to summarize, let alone boil down to a few keywords. The memoir weaves together two main threads: Life amid wildfires fueled by the climate crisis, and my experience living with chronic pain, the result of a reproductive health crisis. My own struggle to put words and narrative arcs to those experiences—to, in effect, name them—is woven throughout the book.

After filling many pages of notebooks with awkward, often cliched subtitles—there was a lot of “…in a burning world“—I returned to my shelf of nature books, including the work of writers like Terry Tempest Williams, Barry Lopez, and Jamaica Kincaid. I noticed many nature memoirs use a play on the term “natural history” in their subtitles. In my book, I had come up with this compound term, pyronatural history, to denote natural histories concerning fire. Knowing my main title had a bit of a commercial feel to it (“The Last __” is a common title construction) I wanted the subtitle to telegraph to readers that this is a literary work. I figured a good way to do that is to use a made-up word!

Sasha Vasilyuk, author of Your Presence is Mandatory, Bloomsbury Publishing, April 2024

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The name of my debut novel’s main character—Yefim Shulman—plays such a central role the German edition of Your Presence is Mandatory is titled Our Father’s Good Name. As a soldier in Nazi Germany, Yefim is forced to conceal his Jewish surname and assume a Slavic one instead. This was a common practice for captured Soviet Jews and one of the main reasons some of them survived.

Naming characters and places became a very delicate issue for me as I edited Your Presence is Mandatory during Russia’s war in Ukraine. Because this is a story of a Ukrainian family that spans from WWII until the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, there is a lot of sensitivity to which language—Russian or Ukrainian—is being used to write about Ukraine. For decades, Ukrainian was suppressed in favor of Russian. In fact, my grandparents, who inspired this novel, were born speaking Ukrainian but by the time I knew them, they only spoke Russian. In my edits, I had to decide which language my characters were more likely to speak at each point and how to spell names of places depending on the era and the geography. It was a delicate dance between being historically accurate and restoring some linguistic justice.

My author name is another testament to the complicated history of the region. I inherited my grandmother’s Ukrainian last name instead of my grandfather’s Jewish name because of a resurgence of antisemitism during the last year of Stalin’s life when my father was born. To safeguard his future, my grandparents gave him the name Vasilyuk, which passed down to me. On my desk, I keep my grandmother’s memoir and my father’s books (he was a psychologist and wrote poetry)—both Vasilyuks—and it feels like a true honor to add to the writerly legacy of our name.

Brandi Wells, author of The Cleaner, Hanover Square Press, January 2024

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Most of the characters in The Cleaner have nicknames based on what’s in or around their work desks. There’s Yarn Guy, Leftovers, Cheery #1 and Cheery #2, Resume Woman, Sad Intern, and Mr. Buff. There’s also the Rogue Shitter and Sticky Doorknob. The cleaner can’t be certain which of the desks that she cleans belongs to them but she thinks she’s homing in on the answer. 

These nicknames are part of the narrator’s storytelling—she invents characters for her lonely nights and these nicknames help bring them to life. I do this in my own life, because I’m terrible with names. I knew a classmate as “hat guy” for years. But these nicknames, both in fiction and in life, create an ironic kind of intimacy, a way of seeing and knowing that feels important to me. 

To ascribe someone a nickname based on their characteristics is a declaration that you have noticed them, that you remember them. But it’s also a declaration of self: “Here is the nickname that I gave you” and in seeing this nickname, you know something about what I notice and value. You start to know me.

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