The drawbacks of 'deeper meanings' within character names

The origin of a character’s name can be an intriguing discovery for a reader as quite often it may pre-empt certain events that will happen to that character or relate somehow to their personality. JK Rowling must have spent a good portion of time deciding on which ancient culture to borrow from when designing her fantasy world, in particular its character and spells, as almost every character’s name has some kind of backstory. Should we be following suit with our own characters? There is a tendency to not want to just call our protagonist something quite ordinary like ‘John’ or ‘Jack’ because we want our works to have a deeper meaning than something just plucked out of the air. Likewise we want our readers to become more involved with our characters and allowing them to explore and work out what clever spin we’ve put into the novels can be a fun way of doing that. Trying to provide extra meaning in the book can be a constant struggle, especially in longer more fantastical books  that border into the fantasy genre. I get the positive aspects of doing this and it makes me wonder, what could be so wrong about doing this? Any additional depth is surely beneficial to a novel, but this is not necessarily so. To start with, let’s look at this from a real life vantage point.

Deeper character meanings can easily take away realism

If you’re looking to promote realism in your novels then naming characters after their personality traits or as a way of pre-meditating what will happen to them is not the right way to go. If you’re not too bothered by how realistic you want your novel to come across in this sense then by all means, name your cooks Sage or your thieves Klepto; it can add a little niceness that doesn’t need to be realistic. From a realism point of view however, names don’t tend to predict what we’re going to do with our lives. A parent who whomever names a new-born isn’t exactly gifted with foresight and so it makes little sense for a character’s name to have a strong connection with their personality or future activities. 

There are exceptions to this rather general statement though; families who are extremely dedicated to a particular cause or belief set are likely to name their children in honour of that, it’s also likely that that child will adopt those same beliefs. Think of Lucius Malfoy naming his son after a kind of serpent; it actually makes sense since the family is so dedicated to the symbolism of the snake. This could also serve as a form of irony if the character is strongly against what their heritage implies, it doesn’t always have to be an insightful name but rather a contrasting description of the character. In another instance it could also hold that somebody has twisted themselves around a pre-existing name and adopted it as part of their identity; Jack Sparrow has a tattoo of a Sparrow on his chest, but his name is otherwise ordinary. If he was called Sinbad Skeleton then it would be an unrealistic prediction of events to come, even if it is an awesome name. Forming your identity around your name sounds like an odd way to go about things but several studies have noted the odd occurrence of people doing just that when it comes to their careers. Even if realism is your thing, maybe you could name your cook Julia Sage after all.

Some characters may have adopted names that were not their original, birth name and this is fine too, often it can work especially well with characters from unusual pasts or with unusual roles to play. Marilyn Manson named himself after two of the most iconic people of a particular era, though iconic for entirely different reasons, and therefore his name has deeper meaning but is firmly placed in a realistic situation. Chosen or adopted pseudonyms, legal name changes, nicknames and so on are all fair game when you’re writing as all of it is realistic. If you want to nickname somebody then it’s going to require a decent explanation of how it is they’ve come to abandon their old name and so it must fit neatly into the plotline. There’s a slight risk of overkill with this too; naming a schoolgirl ‘Otter’ for her love of the water and then having her meet a load of otters later on would be a really weird thing to do.
 

The final category I’ll put into ‘it doesn’t really break realism’ argument is some kind of Godly, supernatural or alien character whereby their name has been translated into something understandable by the human race or, depending on what kind of character it is, regular and ordinary people. Naming a vampire Sanguis may be slightly unoriginal but may be explained by the fact that the vampire is several hundred years old and his original name is far too complicated to start trying to pronounce. Alternatively, maybe he wants a break from his old identity so he’s focused on a blood-related one because his sense of humour revolves around the irony of, “I am that which I drink.” 

As long as you can explain the origin of somebody’s name within the universe you have created then there is nothing wrong with it. What I would argue you didn’t do is name characters, from birth, names which pre-empt what will happen to them unless there is some form of divine intervention involved. Going back to JK Rowling; one of the characters is called Remus Lupin, he was bit by a werewolf as a child and as such became one himself. Lupin is Latin for wolf and Remus is the name of one of the twins from a famous, Roman story about the origins of Rome. In the story the twins were sent out to be killed by the King only to be raised by a female wolf instead. It does mean that Remus’ name literally has no basis in the universe that he exists within. That’s not to say it’s not interesting; it is, it’s just not realistic. Before wondering about the effect it has on realism you first need to determine whether you care that it’ll break the book away from that possibility of ‘it could be real’ that many fantasy or sci-fi books base themselves around.

It may influence the character too much

When I was studying psychology I became very interested in a phenomenon that occurred during one of the studies called the Rosenhan experiment. In short, the study involved sending several people who had no mental health problems but who had been given identical, fake, diagnosis notes to 12 psychiatric hospitals to see whether the doctors and nurses would recognize they were actually perfectly sane. Did they? Did they hell. On exit all of these pseudopatients had been diagnosed with some kind of problem, seven of which were schizophrenia. Why? Well, because they had been labelled from the start as mentally ill and the doctors and nurses treated them as such. They perceived all behaviours as unusual and as evidence of their symptoms when, really, they were just wandering around being rather regular. Ironically, the actual patients expressed suspicion that these pseudopatients weren’t actually ill, many of them believing he pseudopatients were undercover journalists. The problem that the Rosenhan experiment demonstrated was that when you label something you tend to twist everything around it to fit into that original diagnosis. We do it all the time and this study is a frightening example of how even trained medical professionals are prone to these diagnosis-bias beliefs. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they did a follow up study.

By labelling our characters with origin name stories we run the risk of influencing the character to such a degree that they are simply play acting into this box we’ve drawn for them. A name that is personality driven is particularly vulnerable to this diagnosis-bias. If you name your character after something that means ‘to lead’ or ‘a strong leader’ then this personality label could easily stick with him throughout the novel, even in situations where he shouldn’t be strong or shouldn’t be leading. It’s a very restrictive label that can easily backfire and you should be aware of whether you’re boxing your character into a specific, ideal persona that you thought would fit him. We need to be careful at all times not to make two-dimensional characters because not only is it boring for the readers but it’s boring to write about and, frankly, a sign of a bad writer. Though there isn’t anything inherently wrong with making a nod at a character’s finer qualities by eluding to it in some abstract manner it can often dominate a character’s nature by making the name meaning extremely restrictive or overly positive/negative. A villain doesn’t need a name that alludes to death, evilness or blood but it can be acceptable to go for something a little less obvious and a little less restrictive. A personality should first and foremost be natural and appropriate for the character it is matched to. Certain aspects of that personality need to be explained and not simply slotted in alongside a stereotype that may occur if you’ve already put a name to who they are as a person. Diagnosing a character as evil isn’t a natural progression of their personality but is aligning them with an ideological representation of something they have not acquired through experience.

Legit way of choosing a name; pick whichever is generated as the largest.

So the point I’m trying to make is that giving your characters names based on what you’d like them to be or do is a sure fire way to box them in, unless you make yourself very aware of still allowing them to flourish and extend beyond that label. The Rosenhan experiment demonstrates that once we have a fixed idea of somebody’s nature it can be very hard to break away from that and any behaviour, any action or situation will lead us right back to that original diagnosis. This can have dangerous consequences within your novel as before you’ve even started you’ve restricted yourself. A good writer will be able to break away from doing this, provided he or she is aware what could come of their fairly innocent name choosing.