Scribbles On Scribbling

A Rose By Any Other Name - the naming of characters in fiction

When writing fiction, which comes first, the character or the name?

Many fiction writers follow the rule that names of characters should be decided at the outset, because as people in stories start to come alive, it becomes impossible to imagine them with a different name – in the same way that we often find it disconcerting when a friend suddenly announces they want to be called something else.

There are also sound practical reasons for sticking with the names that we start off with. If we change a character's name after the first draft stage, we will have to check the entire manuscript for any unintended consequences. For example, that sentence mentioning the protagonist walking at dusk may not work if the character's name has been changed to Dawn. Or, if our hero's name is changed to Miles, there may be some sentences where we have to express distances in kilometres.

But as with most 'rules' of writing, the one of settling names early in the process is sometimes ignored. In Claire Tomalin’s excellent biography of Thomas Hardy, she mentions his experimentation with the heroine's name in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. At various stages of writing, Tess was Cis Woodrow, Sue Woodrow and Love Woodrow. Occasionally she was Sue Troublewell, Sue Troublefield and Rose-Mary Troublefield, before eventually becoming a Durbeyfield after being a Turberville. Most people agree the novel turned out well despite the names of its characters being more changeable than the British weather during its creation.

Another 'rule' is that names should bear some resemblance of tone with the character - applying the name Joy to an unremittingly morose curmudgeon will seem perverse unless it is with ironic intent.

We are left to wonder what the redoubtable Henry James had on his mind in the naming of Fanny Assingham.

A question of misattribution

Now that we scribblers have been knocking about for centuries, it seems inevitable that everything we write has been written before to some extent. And if we're honest, many of our ideas are at least partly inspired by those who have preceded us. But our better natures acknowledge that the person who first thought of some memorable phrase deserves recognition for their pioneering brilliance. After all, it's the least we expect for ourselves – either to be protected by copyright or at least be given a suitable plug if our 'original' work is quoted.

So it seems fit to bemoan those occasions when no effort is made to attribute a quote to the person who used it first. There are many famous examples. The survival of the fittest is widely attributed to Darwin, when it was the polymath Herbert Spencer who first used the phrase.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, is usually attributed to Muhammad Ali rather than his trainer and mentor Drew 'Bundini' Brown.

Perhaps the best example is that marvellous adage about writing something long because there was insufficient time to write something shorter. In various forms, the expression has been attributed to a panoply of writers including Bernard Shaw, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Woodrow Wilson, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Goethe and Winston Churchill. However, the first appearance of this pithy apothegm, in English at least, appears to be an early translation from Blaise Pascal's Lettres Provinciales (1657): I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short.

Not for nothing do we often hear the cry: good writers borrow, great writers steal ­– and you're right – there does seem to be some contention about who said something like that first!

Hearing voices – how characters speak

There are many devices available to a writer to differentiate the voices of their fictional characters. One character might swear repeatedly, in contrast to another whose language is consistently prim and proper. Or the writer might choose to distinguish a character by giving them a catch phrase that they use repeatedly, as happens with Yakimov in Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy and Bernard Tremaine in McEwan's Black Dogs, both of whom frequently pepper their conversation with the term 'dear boy'.

A popular writer's choice for novels set in the past is to lend authenticity to characters by replicating the speech patterns of the period in which the novel is set. This requires a degree of licence, because being strictly accurate could make for a daunting reader experience. For example, a historical novel set in the fourteenth century might prove impenetrable to most of us if written in Chaucerian English.

The obvious compromise is for the writer to make historical protagonists convincing by giving them voices that fuse contemporary English with the style of language from the historical period in question. Many great writers have achieved this successfully. Examples include the Victorian characters in John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, Grace Marks as an 1840s Canadian in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and Thomas McNulty as an Irish immigrant soldier in the American civil war of Sebastian Barry's Days Without End.

A more extreme route to differentiate a character's speech is to invent an entirely new language for them, which Anthony Burgess did so successfully for Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Alex rages at the world in Nadsat, with its vocabulary of often Russian inspired words such as, veck, deng, polyclef, crasting, gulliver, droog, viddy, tolchock, and smecking.

Burgess is supposed to have spoken ten languages and lectured in phonetics and linguistics. Quite handy that, for creating distinctive voices.

Close reading

Most writers read avidly, not least because usually to read well is to write well. But are we reading in a variety of different ways? Just as athletes vary their training routines with anaerobic sprint running as well as aerobic long distance running, writers can benefit from varying their modes of reading.

Often we just want to curl up into a chair and let a narrative flow over us without over-analysing the writer’s craft – we just want to enjoy the story! But as with the athlete, we can benefit from varying our regime, finding time and space also for 'close reading', which is a staple activity well known to literature students, but is potentially just as rewarding to those of us who have never studied the subject formally.

Close reading mode lends itself not to the armchair but to the desk, wrestling with the text. All writers can benefit from close reading without being literary purists or experts on Sterne and Proust. First we read some paragraphs intensively, observing and recording meticulously what is happening in the text – everything that strikes us, such as lexis, syntax, figures of speech, tone, rhyme, rhythm, pace, viewpoint, rhetorical features and active/passive voice.

Next we frame probing questions around why the author made all their choices in terms of subject, form and theme in the text. For example, why did the author choose such short sentences in that particular paragraph and much longer sentences in the following one?

Then we start to interpret the text and form an opinion of it, constructing a persuasive argument about the effect the text has on us and what meaning we derive from it. Naturally this is subjective – there are no 'right' or 'wrong' answers – but the discipline of the close reading process enables us to read more critically, which in turn can heighten self-awareness of our own writing and how it works or could work better.