Since I’m on spring break for the next two weeks, I’m going to try and write a post every weekday. The first five will be about my strange variety of writing habits, which I’ll kick off today with the blog’s namesake.
I’ve been collecting business cards since eighth grade. On my braver days I’ll go door to door in a line of stores, entering, checking for business cards, taking any business cards, and leaving without a word. Usually I’m too shy, so I wait until whoever is behind the cash register has turned away to swipe them. Art fairs are gold mines, it seems like there’s some kind of correlation between have an interesting name and making art. Doctors offices are good because they can hundreds of individual names on one rack, but it takes a while to collect them all and usually someone comes over to ask why I need the contact info for ten different anesthesiologists before I can get them all. Usually, though, people just take a young adult grabbing the business card for a hotel manager or restaurant owner that he clearly has no need to contact as another weird part of life best left uncommented on.
I’d already filled an old tissue box with my collection before I started seriously writing, it just seemed like a cool thing to collect. When I did start writing, though, I had trouble coming up with names for characters. Nothing seemed to quite fit the people I had in mind, and I was too obsessive to let them go with poorly fitting names. At first the business card collection was just a way to get over that initial block. Draw a card, that’s their name, move on.
It turned out to have more uses than that. Most business cards list businesses and addresses, so I can use it to generate settings too (though that means that a disproportionate number of my stories take place in restaurants in Edina, still need to find a way to work around that). It’s also helpful for generating player names for role playing games. Of course, that means that when the rest of my Dungeons and Dragons party has names like Shorast and Rombutan, the most fantastical option I can dredge up is usually something like Philip Ecton, but even then it feels more authentic (plus all my characters tend to feel like someone from a very different genre plopped in a fantasy world anyway).
Sometimes when I tell people about my low-tech random name generator, they think that using real names will mean bland, uninspired names. And yeah, there aren’t too many people named Shadow or Athena handing out business cards, but people do have pretty wacky and interesting names sometimes. Just glancing through a few business cards, I found Jojo Wubben, Marco Mraz, and Dr. Moe A. Gallagher.
The most common critique, though, is that it doesn’t let you create names to fit the character’s personality or offer an extra layer of meaning. I get the sentiment, and even with the random name generator I often find myself plowing through twenty or thirty cards looking for a name with a pleasant sound to it or some extra meaning or that doesn’t violate the number one rule of writing (an invention of my friend Lucas that no two characters can have names that start with the same letter, which seems trivial but really helps keep characters distinct). But I still feel a need to defend my creation, so I say that the way it works in my tissue box is the way it works in real life. We aren’t assigned names based on how we act or to signify something symbolic about our role in a plot. Instead, we grow into the names we’re given. That’s what I try to do with the random name generator. I give a character a name when they’re still a vague notion, nothing but a necessary piece of the plot or an idea I want to explore. As they get more developed, they come to embody the archetypes and meaning behind a name. Or to subvert it. Or neither, sometimes they just wear their name as a name like anyone else, but it still feels like they grow with it as the story develops.
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