N is for names

I’ve written a few times about the significance of certain names in Foul and Fair – James Hogan, Martin Pike – which I’ve borrowed from the world of real football. There are also a few characters named after less famous, but no less real, people. Naming characters is an inexact science. Some names serve a symbolic function – Hayley Birnham’s surname was important, as was that of the incidental character Chris Marlow, for example – while others are just names but they have to sound right. At one point in the narrative, I needed a schoolboy character to be persistently cheeky and to wind James up. I tried numerous different monikers, but nothing quite fitted. There were other requirements that the name had to fulfil (I shan’t go into detail – spoilers) and I was stumped. Then I realised that the personality of the child in question was exactly that of one of my friends from Man v Fat Bournemouth, whose forename was also phonetically just what I needed. I duly asked his permission, and so Christian Bulpitt was immortalised in print.

Christian isn’t the only one. Two more schoolchildren – chatty, disruptive girls at Cole Hill Secondary School – were named (again, with permission) after Becca Elliott and Rachel Darbyshire, two of my wife’s teaching colleagues. Another of her colleagues, Chris Denton, was due to be namechecked elsewhere, but sadly that particular subplot, along with Chris’ character, was cut altogether during the rewriting when I introduced Hayley. That’s showbiz, Chris, maybe next time.

Sometimes names are reverse engineered. Writing Dead Man Singing, Dave felt like a suitably common name for a 1970s rock star – Dave Gilmour, Dave Mason, David Bowie – although my Dave’s surname, Masters, was only determined after I thought of Dave Remastered as the name for his tribute act.

Sometimes characters get placeholder names which are changed during the writing process, and other times you realise that you’ve gone past the point of no return and it’s too late to switch. I once heard Russell T. Davies say that when he revived Doctor Who for the BBC in 2005, no one in the production team initially spotted that the Doctor’s two companions, Rose and Jack, shared the names of the protagonists from the movie Titanic. In practical terms it wouldn’t have been too late to change them at that point, but by then everyone was too invested in those characters, so they let it stand.

One author friend of mine told me that he frequently puts the names of people he knows into his books, and is often surprised when they take offence and regard it as an invasion of their privacy. I can understand their reaction. While authors will sometimes be guilty of inventing a name that already exists in real life – I’m sure there is a Kieran Butcher somewhere out in the world, and I can only apologise to him, particularly if he happens to be a football coach – that’s a different matter to consciously purloining someone’s identity. Personally, I would always ask first; as with many other things in life, consent matters.