What's in a Name - by Susie

Morwenna Thistlethwaite.

She’s a real person. I came across her in an artist’s catalogue and instantly wanted to include her name in a novel. Gamine, wistful and floaty – inclined to cheesecloth and batting enormous lashes – she’d be a pastie-baking girl from a vast Cornish mining family and the inn-o-cent object of an evil pirate’s passion. A pirate called…

Rex Frothichops. See, I can’t help it. A writing friend anagrammed her husband’s name and came up with this, my all-time favourite. He’s so …nineteenth century. But wait – I can also see him at the beginning of time, a rock-dinosaur with rabies – T.Rex Frothichops.
Sorry. Getting carried away there.

Names are so more-ish, don’t you find? And a good name – or rather the right name – is often hard to find.
There are many name-researching websites on the net, and I’ve just been a-sampling. There are the baby names sites, where you can choose a name according to its popularity in any given year; sites giving the meanings behind names (did you know that Harry means Army Power? The poor lad was predestined for the job), There’s a site where you can generate a name in any language – I asked for a female name in Esperanto and a male name in Bulgarian (‘My Gott –‘ Valentin Boyko’s voice roughened with desire. ‘Glorinda Katida, vot are you doink to me?’ ) And, best of all, there are sites where you can enter details of your character and a name is randomly generated to suit. I put in: ‘oozing, slimy, disgusting, putrid’ and got ‘Vilescum’. Count Vilescum, of Totterdown Towers, who only comes out at night and spends his days floating ominously in dirty bathwater…

How do you choose your characters’ names? Do they arrive, perfectly formed, in your head or on the page, or do you spend weeks searching for them? How did A.A. Milne come up with Winnie-the-Pooh? Would the book have been as successful if the characters had been called Teddy, Tiger, Young Pig and Whingeing Donkey? How did Nabokov (a name to conjure with itself) come up with Humbert Humbert, not to mention Lolita?

Which brings me to titles (of books, I mean, rather than that of Count Vilescum). Sorry to be Eeyorish about this, but the title of your book – and your own name – will be the first, and probably the only, words of your book that will ever be read. As potential readers scan the rows upon rows of book spines in the library or the bookshop, only a small number of titles will leap out at them. Why those particular titles? On-e-ly Gott (as Valentin Boyko might mutter) vould knows. It’s almost impossible to predict what makes a winning title – but the right one can elevate your book from pedestrian to prize-winning.

Take Gary Leon Hill. He caused a storm in 2006 with his book entitled: People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves To Unsuspecting Bystanders And What To Do About It. Non-fiction certainly seems to lend itself to eye-catching titles, though I Was Tortured By A Pygmy Love Queen (yes, really) did pretty well too. My favourite, though, for its simple, unarguable succinctness, is Jack Pelicano’s Bombproof Your Horse

So, dear writer, choose your names with care. They could be the making or the breaking of your book. I went to a talk by Patrick Gale recently, who said that his agent only picked up his first novel because of the title: The Aerodynamics of Pork. I wonder if I could come up with something similar for my new one? Whaddya think, Valentin?
‘Aach – and peegs might fly…’


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