12+   Writers often comment on the difficulty of naming characters. But I didn't have that problem with one of my earliest stories, which featured four children, sibling pairs, John and Wendy and Jack and Jane. Not very imaginative, I know, but I was ten when I wrote Sand Island, inspired by Enid Blyton's Secret Seven and Famous Five.

After this precocious start, I had to wait until my late twenties and early thirties, when I lived in England, for my next purple writing patch. I wrote short stories for UK lifestyle magazines and writing competitions, some of which I've since revisited and shared on Tall And True. 

As with Sand Island's siblings, I don't recall labouring over names for my stories. I wrote a children's story, The Cat in the Trunk, in the early 1990s with a young boy, Stevie, finding Tom-Tom the cat in a trunk who a couple of gangsters, Jerry and Daphne, had kidnapped. 

In another children's story, Classroom Conservation, written in 1992, I wanted to create a classroom of characters representative of multicultural England learning about conservation and recycling. So, in addition to traditional Anglo names like Bridgette Preston, Ellie Braithwaite and Lennie Smith, I had Varni Singh, Peter Chow and Ali Fawzi.

Both Sides of the Story

One of the last stories I wrote in England before returning to Australia was the multi-part Both Sides of the Story in 1994. This was not a children's story, with each part tackling or reflecting on adult themes of infidelity, the 1990s Balkan Wars, domestic violence, and the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports.

I wanted the characters' names in these stories to reflect their ethnicity and demographics. Westminster MP Austin struggled to write his resignation letter, Tibor recalled his boyhood playing football in pre-war Bosnia, Ruth excused her husband's violence, and Winston dreamed of being a champion on the track.

Twenty-five-plus years later, I reworked Both Sides of the Story to share on Tall And True and my storytelling podcast, Tall And True Short Reads, and published it as an ebook. With more maturity as a writer, I thought I'd have to rename many of my characters, as I've done with other stories from back then, like 1991's Escape to the Beach, where the deserted-wife protagonist, Hillary, became Megan in 2019. 

But I only changed one name in Both Sides of the Story, the Westminster MP. He also had a different name in my drafts, where he started as Ashby but became Austin in the story I submitted to the Ian St James Awards in 1994 and Baxter in the reworked version I shared on Tall And True in 2019. Using his surname only sounded better for his class on the page and saved me from a tricky long sibilance when I narrated his Westminster story for Tall And True Short Reads.

Thanks, Furious Fiction

Along with launching Tall And True in 2017, I credit the Australian Writers' Centre's Furious Fiction short story writing challenge with fueling my most recent creative purple patch in my fifties and sixties. I've written and shared 500-word stories for every challenge since April 2020, and in 2024, I wrote my fifth April story and forty-third Furious Fiction.  

Most of my stories have two or more characters, so that's around eighty-plus times I've had to name somebody or "something", in the case of the advanced companion droid Jack in my January 2024 story, A New Jack. 

There have been a few double-ups, and in August 2024, almost a treble-up when I started writing a Furious Fiction, in which I wanted to pay homage to America's first female astronaut, Sally Ride, by naming one of my characters after her.

However, when I searched for "Sally" on Tall And True, I found two stories where I'd already used the name: Splendid Views from August 2019's Furious Fiction and A Window Table from August 2023's challenge.

Despite being an amusing coincidence, I decided three August Sallys was one too many and chose another name instead for August 2024's entry, Twin Souls in the Universe. Mae, after Mae Jemison, who was the first African-American woman to travel into space. 

No Names

While I've been fortunate in naming my characters, there was one story where I spent several hours of Furious Fiction's tight 55-hour deadline researching names: The Power of Two. 

The problem was that my protagonists were a pair of superheroes, and I wanted their names to reflect their superpowers and personalities. But as I admitted in the story insight, I hadn't realised there are so many Marvel and DC Comics with "super-something", "super-this", and "super-that".

Eventually, I settled on Long Vision and Solo Shield. You might like to google Marvel and DC Comics' variations of "Long", "Vision", "Solo", and "Shield" to see how difficult it was to create two unique superheroes!

What's in a Name?

Over the years, I've used the names of relatives and friends in my stories … and even a neighbour's dog, "Sally"!

My goal in choosing names is to match characters and their roles in my story, whether based on ethnicity, demographics, superhero powers or personality.

I've come a long way since writing about John, Wendy, Jack, and Jane in Sand Island, both in years and experience as a writer. Though decades on, I used John again in Memories and Marshmallows, set at the seaside, like Sand Island, and Jack twice, as the droid in A New Jack and a son in the reflective Timeline Memories.

Perhaps I'm still that ten-year-old boy dreaming of being a writer!

© 2024 Robert Fairhead

Thanks to Markus Winkler for sharing the Name Search image on Pixabay.

N.B. You might like to read one of Writing Tips' posts on Writing First Sentences.