{"id":347,"date":"2025-05-20T14:52:41","date_gmt":"2025-05-20T14:52:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alecclayton.com\/writingetc\/?p=347"},"modified":"2025-05-20T14:52:42","modified_gmt":"2025-05-20T14:52:42","slug":"names-names-names","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alecclayton.com\/writingetc\/names-names-names\/","title":{"rendered":"Names, Names, Names"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What\u2019s in a name<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of my favorite things about writing fiction is coming up with names for characters\u2014names that say something about the characters, hopefully with a bit of humor. Like Driver and Punkin, the Lumpkin twins\u2019 parents in Tupelo<\/em>. The inspiration for giving them nicknames (if I remember correctly I never called them by any other names) came from my own parents, Leonard Auvergne and Carolyn Clayton, who were known by one and all as Toots and Chick\u2014Chick because for most of his young life my dad worked in or owned a series of chicken hatcheries, and Toots because at the time they started dating and got married Toots or Tootsie was a popular nickname for girls. Throughout my life, I never knew them to be called by anything else other than Toots and Chick or Mr. Clayton and Ms. C.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I could have called those characters Toots and Chick after my parents, but I take efforts in all my books to create characters who stand on their own and do not lean on the real-life people who may have inspired their creation. For instance, Travis Earl \u201cRed\u201d Warner\u2019s, first name came from my brother-in-law, Travis Littlejohn, but he was nothing like Travis. I was cognizant of the fact that many first-time writers pattern their protagonists after themselves, so I went to great lengths to make Travis as different from me as I possibly could. I am a tiny man, standing five-foot-three and weighing, at the time, barely 120 pounds. I wrote Travis as a six foot tall and over 200 pound bruiser of a football player and gave him speech patterns stolen from Kerouac\u2019s On The Road<\/em>, and made him a pretty wild and crazy guy, something I\u2019m definitely not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Beauregard Parker called Bobo, in The Descendents of the Pirate Pegleg Josiah Johnson<\/em>, owner of a bar named Bar Bar in Seattle in 1899, I wanted a patrician Southern name. Like a plantation owner transplanted from the cotton fields of Mississippi or Louisiana. I thought Beauregard was the perfect moniker for him. As for the nickname Bobo, that was one of my brothers-in-laws\u2019 name. His first name was Jim, and his brother was named Charles, but they were called Sonny and Brother. If I write another story about brothers, maybe I can name them Sonny and Brother. Or if they\u2019re really messed up or crazy, maybe I\u2019ll name them Fubar and Snafu. Or is that a step too far?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wrote about another Bobo, this one in Locked In<\/em>. \u00a0He was Willie Ray\u2019s cellmate when Willie Ray was in jail. He described himself thusly: \u201cI\u2019m Bobo, but people call me Speedo. My real name is Nancy.\u201d I think that or something like that came from a silly 1950s rock-n-roll song by The Cadillacs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everybody\u2019s favorite male character in Locked In <\/em>was Dream Wilson, a kind of monk without a monastery. He is quite dreamy. The best, kindest and most talented character of all was Willie Ray\u2019s wife,  Ella. No need for a special name for this character.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rastus <\/a>Tillinghast<\/a>, also in Locked In, <\/em>is an arsonist and one really bad dude. He\u2019s one of the dozen or so kids of Pee Wee and Belinda May Tillinghast. I don\u2019t know why I picked those names, but they seem to fit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Weatherman Donny Dilbert, the Channel 4 WSMC weatherman, showed up in both The Backside of Nowhere<\/em> and Locked In<\/em>. When we did a complete reading of The Backside of Nowhere<\/em> with actors reading the parts, actor Alex Smith kept breaking into laughter every time he read the name Weatherman Donny. None of us knew why, but it became infectious. We all laughed every time, and I simply had to find a way to fit him into another book. And then, sneakily, I created a character named Donny who was not a weatherman but a member of the Weather Underground. a far-left militant organization first active in 1969.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, from Locked In<\/em> was a throwaway character named Wigs MacBryce.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What\u2019s in a name One of my favorite things about writing fiction is coming up with names for characters\u2014names that say something about the characters, hopefully with a bit of humor. Like Driver and Punkin, the Lumpkin twins\u2019 parents in Tupelo. The inspiration for giving them nicknames (if I remember correctly I never called them … <\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nNames, Names, Names - Alec Clayton - Writing etc.<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/alecclayton.com\/writingetc\/names-names-names\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Names, Names, Names - Alec Clayton - Writing etc.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"What\u2019s in a name One of my favorite things about writing fiction is coming up with names for characters\u2014names that say something about the characters, hopefully with a bit of humor. 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