What’s in a Name?
One of the joys of writing fiction is being able to populate your own world. Seriously, how cool is that? You can choose who lives next to whom, what they do for a living, explore quirks and personalities that are as familiar or as foreign as you like. And that process includes selecting names.
Okay, so it’s maybe not such a joy, after all. The truth is, I hate selecting names.
My characters come to life as I write, not before. They shift and morph and often change the entire narrative arc of my stories. They become who they are in chapter five, or eight, or ten. So the name I started with generally just doesn’t fit the character as they emerge, as they talk with other characters, as they make choices, as they tell me where the book needs to go. Ah, but word processing makes that easy, doesn’t it? Just do a global search-and-replace, and voilà! Kate Stewart is now Miranda Weatherby.
The exception is the name of the protagonist in my current mystery series. I found a name for her and it… just worked. The 10th book in the series, The Honeymoon Homicides, just came out, and Sydney is still perfectly, marvelously, appropriately Sydney.
I have to wonder if her name works because I didn’t make it up. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it ahead of time. It was a gift from the gods of travel.
image: Jason Hawke for Unsplash
I’d gone up to Québec to do a talk about a prior character and series, Martine LeDuc, the protagonist of my novels Asylum and Deadly Jewels. I live on the tip of Cape Cod, so this is a long drive! But I was prepared: I had a set of CDs (yeah, it was that long ago—2016) from The Great Courses, and I was good to go. I’d already taken their class on the Vikings, the history of London, women in medieval literature, and a few I’m probably forgetting, and I was looking forward to the new set on the history of espionage.
I’d just passed the border into Vermont when the professor started talking about the man who was the model for Ian Fleming’s James Bond, a real-life cosmopolitan, elegant, enigmatic spy. Not just an agent for the British Secret Service, he was a double and sometimes treble agent, Russian-born, world-traveled, who had torrid affairs with aristocratic women, slipped behind enemy lines during World War Two, planned an unsuccessful coup in the Soviet Union, procured Persian oil concessions for the British Admiralty… the list goes on and on.
His name was Sydney Reilly.
And there it came to me as I drove through Vermont’s snow-covered mountains, that this was a gorgeous name. Even if people didn’t know the history, it was a name that resonated, that was both memorable and slightly exotic, that would fit someone destined for adventure. I named “my” Sydney at once and never looked back.
Of course, I didn’t have the sense to look the spy up online and ascertain how he spelled his name, so my Sydney spells hers a little differently; but perhaps that just adds to her mystique. (She’d laugh if she heard me: I can just imagine her saying, “Mystique? Me? You’ve got the wrong girl, Jeannette!”)
So… what’s in a name? Sometimes it’s just a happy coincidence. One thing I know for sure: I’m going to keep listening to the Great Courses. Who knows what might be gifted to me next?
(avatar image Sydney Riley: ArtGuru)