Dewey, Cheetham and Howe

I had a silly online exchange with my brother just now, on the topic of names. We currently have dealings with a firm of solicitors called Penman and something, and I said that Penman and Drudge had a good Dickensian ring to it. (Note to Americans: British solicitor are attorneys and soliciting is not a crime. Or rather, soliciting is a crime, but solicitors don’t usually get involved in soliciting.)

While on that topic, we admired the names of some real firms:

• Heidrick & Struggles (a recruitment firm)
• Reeves & Pain (a bunch of funeral directors in Oxford)
• Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom (US lawyers)

And a few not so real ones: Dewey, Cheetham and Howe, a US partner to the well-known London firm of Sue, Grabbit and Runne. Oh heck, and if we’re on this topic, I have to tell you that – cross my heart and hope to die – I was at school with a boy called Robin Banks. He was, as it happens, perfectly nice and entirely honest, but an itsy-bitsy part of me does hope that he’s doing 20 years in maximum security.

There’s a pleasure in such thoughts, no? It’s fun messing about with things like this and, of course, authors used to mess about all the time. Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling famously let his names tell you about the characters. There was the excellent Squire Allworthy, the villainous Reverend Thwackum, the selfish Honour Blackmore, the dilettante Mr Nightingale and so on.

Of those names, the most often quoted examples are the Thwackum / Allworthy pair. The purpose of those names is so loud it shouts.

But even in Fielding, the approach to naming is generally a little more subtle than the Thwackum example suggests. There actually are people called Nightingale, and nightingales are best known for their particularly melodious birdsong, not for their moneyed life in high society London.

Likewise, the name Tom Jones itself is on the one hand a nice way to indicate a sturdy man-of-the-people type, a healthy everyman, but the name is also one of the most common in the UK. It’s hard to argue that the name choice is artificial when it’s also a stunningly common one.

These days, the directness of the Thwackum / Allworthy approach seems too much. It’s a bit hard to articulate why. Yes, OK, it feels very artificial to call a character Allworthy – but who are we kidding? All of fiction is completely artificial. The whole damn thing is made up. Every other aspect of character – looks, clothes, speech mannerisms, backstory – is invented for a particular purpose. Why not names too?

I guess that the real answer is that names that are very on-the-nose (like Thwackum) have a flattening effect. They shout about one aspect of character and that invites the reader – and perhaps the author – to neglect the rest. Since rounded characters are THE essential tool for getting readers engaged in a book, names that kill the character are to be avoided.

Which leaves authors – you and me – in a little bit of a bind. On the one hand, we feel drawn to Fielding-style names. Not the grosser end of the scale, but the Mr Nightingale / Sophia Western end. On the other hand, we feel we should avoid it. We’re too modern, too sophisticated for those kind of naming games.

But, but, but …

Perhaps there’s a middle way here. Some suggestions:

• I think it matters that you are settled with a name. If a name feels wrong, then change it. (And, for because Find / Replace All is a useful tool, I try to use names that I can easily find with a word search. So ‘Ed’ would not be a name I’d use unless I was a million per cent confident that I wasn’t going to change it. ‘Edwina’ on the other hand would do fine.
• Some demographic matching does make sense and lend colour. One of the series characters in my Fiona books is her boss, Dennis Jackson. He’s much older than her, much bigger, much more solid. His name reflects his age. (How many twenty-something Dennises do you know?) It’s also a Wales-appropriate name, without shouting Welshness at you. The name rounds out and thickens the character. It’s a decent vessel for the man himself.
• You certainly can play a little. At one point in the first book, Fiona ‘Fi’ Griffiths explains to her beau that her name is iffy. Her first name is an ‘if’ in reverse, and there are two more ifs buried in her surname. That iffiness somehow suits her vocation (detective, solver of logic puzzles) but also her nature – provisional, ungrounded. The iffiness in her name is so hidden, so closed to the reader, that it doesn’t shout at you the way ‘Thwackum’ does. The fact that Fiona Griffiths finds that stuff in her name tells you more about her than the name itself.
• A former colleague, Sarah, suggested that, when you think about characters, you think about their story purpose. Her debut novel (one which JW helped find an agent for) was about a girl who had never been outside. That was the title of the book: Outside. One of the key characters was called Willow – a real, contemporary name, but also willow tree, branches, birdsong, light. It’s that kind of lightly associative touch which can enrich a book without toppling it into artifice.

I will say that I’m bad at names. I often don’t settle on important names until I have a complete draft. (I’ve switched genders of key characters too. That can make a really useful difference at times.) But my best names end up feeling like a pair of really comfortable shoes. There’s a quality of fit that just works. Whether that fit is just for me or whether it extends to readers too, I can’t quite say. But your comfort becomes their comfort. A character you feel comfortable with will end up being one you write better and more richly.

Go back to the name of that law firm: Skadden Arps Slate Meagher and Flom. That’s a genuine name. It’s not obviously comic, the way ‘Reeves and Pain’ is comic. But – it’s musical, it’s strange, it’s somehow suggestive without those suggestions ever becoming too clear, too specific. It’s that kind of name that wants to float down on to your page – not with every new name, but with some of the key ones.

Oh yes, and I can’t finish this email without telling you this. Psychologists do in fact believe there’s evidence to suggest that your name can (very slightly) affect your choice of career. So people called Denise are very slightly more likely to become dentists, for example. The article that inspired this search for ‘nominative determinism’? It was a piece on incontinence in the Journal of Urology. The authors of that magnificent piece? AJ Splatt and D Weedon.

Til soon.

Harry

PS: Did I mention that we have rebooted our Festival of Writing? I did not. But we have and you can learn all about it here. It’s miles more affordable than before and I hope you come.

PPS: Last week’s email was about the failures of agents and, as ever, the topic brought forth a torrent of replies. But you do know you don’t need an agent, right? When I sold the Fiona Griffiths series into the US, I had a superb literary agent and got one of the top editors and publishers in the business. But the books failed COMPLETELY. I bought back the rights and self-published them. A couple of years later, and with very little effort, I was making $100K a year.

I’m not saying that’s standard and it’s certainly not automatic. But it is possible. If you want to know the secrets of self-publishing then Debbie Young’s course, here, is outstanding. It’s a very, very expert guide to the art of self-pub, and it’ll save you years of fooling around and making mistakes. Go take a look.