Holly Golightly, Holden Caulfield, Jay Gatsby. These are just a few memorable names from American novels. I don’t mean to say the names alone make the novels remarkable, but I would like to suggest names matter when it comes to our characters. A name immediately hints at a particular kind of person. Holden Caulfield? A pretentious name that stands in ironic contrast to the character who is always bemoaning ingenuous people, those phonies that he detests. Jay Gatsby? Perhaps an equally pretentious name that covers over the harsher actual name, Gatz. Holly Golightly? She tries to breeze through Breakfast at Tiffany’s, desperately trying to ignore the truth of her past. Names matter because names start to build characters.

Often, when my wife Cathy and I are on road trips, we take note of those green highway signs that signal the exits that will point you toward a pair of towns, one to the left and one to the right. Sometimes those two towns form a name. Cathy and I take it and run with it, creating a narrative for Oliver Marshall or Maxwell Greenfield. A name suggests a life. Sometimes we writers start to construct the action of that life based on a set of possibilities made possible by the name alone.

Names also carry with them certain sounds. The long “o” sound of Joan, for instance, and the hard “n” at the end. Quite a different sound from, say, Lucy. Imagine a sentence ending with each of those names, and you’ll hear the difference. Syllable count, along with vowel sounds and consonant sounds contribute greatly not only to the rhythm of a sentence but also to the atmosphere it evokes. “I needed to see Lucy.” “I needed to see Joan.” Hear the difference?

So, this is just a quick post to call attention to the fact that naming a character can be as important as any other tool at our disposal when we begin to imagine a world and the people who reside there. Countless times, I’ve had to change a character’s name because the writing has shown me something about that character that I didn’t know when I began. The original name doesn’t work anymore. Or maybe I’ve found myself drafting sentences that just don’t have the sound or the rhythm I want when using the original name. In writing, everything is fluid. Everything, even names, can be changed.

You might want to try the highway sign game sometime. Spot a pair of cites that make up a name. What does the name suggest? What plot do you begin to envision?