^The Authors’ Atrium

I’m three chapters into a new draft and I already want to throw my laptop into the lake, because I have to invent another set of names. Every time I sit down, I’m forced to choose between something so plain it disappears and something so clever it gives me a headache. And everywhere I look, people are trying way too hard. Every hero is a Latin word for “light,” and every villain’s surname is a pun that the author is clearly very proud of. Just name the damn person.

You do realize where you’re posting this, don’t you? The entire avatar system here is a roomful of adults deciding to answer to the names of dead novelists. If there were a hall of fame for clever and referential, we’d be holding the plaque. For the record, I’m named after a man who named himself after a riverboat call, and I’d say the joke has held up.

That’s a costume, and costumes are fine. Being performative in a forum is a game, and everybody knows the rules. Putting that on the page is different, with a Kubrickian level of layering where every name is a clue to something hidden in the Overlook and the reader’s supposed to notice. I’m not writing a puzzle box. I’m writing people.

Your case of Kubrickian sounds serious. A dose of ipecac will cure it quickly. I’d give it about forty minutes, and the symptoms, I’m told, are very similar to rereading a character named after a Greek god and a sword. You’ll feel terrible, but you’ll have eliminated the problem. It generally works. If not, see a doctor.

Is it so hard to expect some sort of actual answer? I’d like to be taken seriously for five minutes. I take the names seriously, I take the books seriously, and the one thing I’ve never done is wink at the reader. It’s a name. It should do its job and sit down.

For what it’s worth, Bronte, I’ve always loved how your names land. Dexter Voorhees and Marguerite Tessarone sound like people you could actually meet, and that kind of ordinary is much harder to write than it looks. You never reach for a name that announces itself, and I think that’s why your characters feel lived in. You should trust that instinct more than you do.

They do read very smoothly, I’ll give her that, in the way that anything shelf-stable reads smoothly. Dexter Voorhees and Marguerite Tessarone both sound like the ingredient list on a box of soda crackers: nothing wrong with any of it, and nothing you’d call food. I mean it kindly. I’m told that’s the only way I can mean anything.

Twain, I’m going to ask you once, nicely, to get out of the grocery aisle. The next time I won’t be asking nicely, and you know I mean that. Be a good egg.

I’m honestly wounded by this thread. I spend days on names. I once went through three concordances and a Hebrew lexicon to find the right obscure town for chapter eleven, and I have a spreadsheet of Old Testament minor figures I haven’t used yet. I know that’s the exact thing Bronte is complaining about, and I’m trying not to take it personally, but it’s very hard when the work is the part I love most.

Bronte, go with the first name that comes to you, because your first instinct is almost always right. That’s the part of you that already knows who the person is. Although, come to think of it, what is an instinct, really? Does it belong to you or to every ancestor who ever had to decide whether something in the grass was a snake? The lizard part of the brain has opinions about names, and I’d love to know who gave it that authority. Anybody else feel the same?

Twain, at least my characters don’t sound like flavors from a pastry case. Your hero is Jasper Danish and your love interest is Eclair Montgomery, so you’re in no position to lecture anyone about ingredients.

Dumas, thank you, first instinct it is, that’s what I’ll do.

And Hawthorne, dear lamb, it wasn’t about you—I know you put in the work. It’s one thing to assign deep meaning from a place of conviction and something else for the reader to require a pop culture encyclopedia to get why a character named Richard Springfield seduced the wife of another named Yassa.

PS - I have no opinion on reptiles.

Dumas, I’d argue the authority was granted by the Reptilians from their base on the dark side of the moon.

Poe, don’t wind Twain up on that conspiracy bunk.