What’s in a name? Page after page of Night People, I marvelled at the names Barry Gifford came up for characters and places. Like the story he told, the names were over the top and at the same time a perfect distillation of each character. Night People is a wonderful book in many ways, but here are three things I learned from Barry Gifford about the art of naming.
”Here’s the opening of Night People by Barry Gifford: “Big Betty Stalcup kissed Miss Cutie Early on the right earlobe as Cutie drove, tickling her, causing her to swerve the black Dodge Monaco toward the right as she scratched her head."
A colorful name, like a good hook, makes us want to know more.
Who is Big Betty Stalcup? Cutie Early? Where are they going in the black Dodge Monaco? Big Betty Stalcup connotes a larger than life character and together with the name Cutie Early I am drawn into a larger than life story, possibly a satire, and I am pretty sure the story isn’t going to be about the breakup of a married couple living in Connecticut.
A evocative name is itself a shorthand character description.
Like concrete, sensory description, a colorful name, tells us a lot using very little. A good name suggests what the person looks like, his or her nationality, profession, and/or a key personality trait.
Here are some other character names in Night People. Can you guess from the list below, who is a recent divorcee? A lawyer? A police deputy? What else might you surmise from the names?
- Rollo Lamar
- Big Betty Stalcup
- Bobby Dean Baker
- Ernesto and Dagoberto Reyes
- Bosco Bruillard
- Vernon Duke Douglas
- Pearline Nail
- Blackie Lala
- DeLeon, Felda, Birdie, Dawn, Tequesta, Waldo
- Feo Lengua
- Mayo and Hilda Sapp
- Desoto Sturgis
A well-chosen name can conjure a world into being.
Here are some names of places in Night People:
- Fort Sumatra Detention Center for Wayward Women
- The Saturn Bar
- Swindle Ironworks
- Alligator Point
- Egypt City
- Hernando Cortés Motor Court
- Checkerboard Chuckie’s Change of Heart Bar
- Arabi
- Little Saigon
- Chalmette
- Club Spasm
- Jasper Pasco’s Fishin’ Pier and Grocery
Names locate us geographically and culturally. Think of the different street names in the places you’ve lived. Names go along way towards describing the setting in a story. You can also use the connotations associated with certain names to create an alternate fictional reality. For example, Egypt City to my knowledge, doesn’t exist, but to me it connotes names like Memphis and Athens -- and helps me to imagine a city in the southern part of the U.S., probably somewhere between Louisiana and Florida. (especially when included with names like Alligator Point and Chalmette).
A well chosen name can hook the reader, evoke a character, conjure a world. As Barry Gifford writes "The world is really wild at heart and weird on top." (Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula). The names you choose go a long way towards capturing that wild, weird, wondrous world.
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