OG’s BLOG

A couple of months ago I was telling you about the job I did for Discovery Kids last year. The job was to design and build a soccer-playing monkey who could play spokesperson on a Discovery Kids show for kids in the third world. When we originally came up with him, we’d been calling him Freddie. As the show rolled on toward completion, we were asked by the client to change his name to Wanzi, and since he was scheduled to be viewed by kids in a part of the world more familiar with a name like Wanzi than Freddie, we of course agreed to the change.

Which brings me to this book I’ve been writing. The main character is a young boy, a member of an obscure, real-world tribal society. He and all the characters from his village have tribal-sounding names, based on words taken from the native language of his culture. For instance, his large best friend has a native word which means “large or fat”. And so on. I’ve done it this way because the actual tribal names are so incredibly long and similar to each other that it is hard telling them apart. That’s not good.

But I lean toward tribal-sounding names because it just seems appropriate to name him according to who he is. I vacillate on this issue, though, because although he is a tribal kid, people in the rest of the world may find it difficult to keep the characters and all these strange names straight. Although he’s a tribal kid, the main audience for this book is not tribal. It’s English-speaking, and primarily kids who may find the strange names offputting.

Which brings me to the Harry Potter books. Those books feature a magical community full of bizarre names such as Aberforth and Albus Dumbledore, Rubeus Hagrid, Draco Malfoy and so on. Yet the main characters of this book have fairly simple names: Harry and his best friend Ron. I don’t believe this is on accident. I wonder how popular the series would have been if it had been The Adventures of Rubeus Dursleybane instead of Harry Potter. Simple names like Harry and Ron are a lot easier to keep straight while you’re navigating stories with magical twists and turns, right?

While you’re mulling that over, there’s the question of Harry’s other best friend Hermione. Why not Mary? Or Suzie? Or Kaitlyn? Hermione seems to violate the rule of simple names for key characters. Memorable, yes. Suitable to the character, absolutely. But a real mouthful, and I had to be told how to pronounce it, as I reckon a great many people did, when it was spelled out in the fourth book in the series. Before then, I had read it HER-me-un instead of her-MY-o-nee.

As for my book, I’ve decided to keep with the tribal names, but keep them short. I’m also sticking to my own rule of making sure the names of different characters begin with different letters and aren’t too similar. Did you ever get Ori, Nori, and Dori or Dwalin and Balin confused in The Hobbit? Of course you did. The names were almost duplicates. Even though they were Bilbo’s companions on his trip, they were background noise, and almost interchangeable. I’m hoping for a little more out of my characters.

I know people who claim they stopped reading The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings because the names had them too confused. I know what they mean. The songs, the languages, and the names were a bit tedious. Yet I find that charming because Tolkien was a linguist, and the songs, languages and names were very important to him. I can completely forgive him indulging in what he felt was important. It has been said that he built a world and narrative to support his languages, and not necessarily the other way around. Can’t fault a linguist for that. At least he built it his way.

I think my story will have a more interesting flavor for having tribal names, or at least names derived from tribal words, and I just hope the names don’t turn people off. It may be harder to remember the names, but at least it should be more interesting and hopefully more true-to-life than naming my villagers Bob and Joe. And I guess if a publisher is interested in the book and just finds the names too hard to get, well that will be an interesting day.

Meanwhile, I wrote a thousand words on the book yesterday. Seems I’m back on the Write Path…