Naming conventions

When I first started writing stories as a child, I based them on toys I was playing with at the time, mainly Legos. At the time, they came in three settings: town, space, and medieval. To incorporate them all, I had the characters from the space setting travel back in time to the other periods, including the pirate era when that setting was introduced, and have adventures while trying to return to their own time. It was all very much inspired by cartoons and movies, rather than Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, and I even wrote out character profiles of the kind you'd find on the back of G.I. Joe boxes. The irony of creatively applying the marketing strategy for one brand of toy to a different brand of toy was probably lost on me at the time.

Anyway, to fill out the profiles of these characters I had to have names (and codenames, of course), and I just pulled them off the top of my head, whatever I could come up with. This resulted in some pretty bland entries, as the concept of naming a character in such a way as to reveal his nature was something I learned much later, while I was studying creative writing, and especially Syd Field's books on screenwriting. This isn't exactly common in movies, but you do see it sometimes and it can be illuminating if done subtly.

I tended to pick names haphazardly in my fiction, as well, until I realized names do have meaning outside of the individuals bearing them. In particular, you would not want to give a Nazi a Jewish name, or an Irish character an Italian name. Even if you assign no qualities to people of a certain background, you have to acknowledge their heritage to be believable. Inconsistencies like those above would be distracting, because readers would want to know the story behind them. In the melting pot of America, it took me until my teens to actually pay attention to these differences in any real way. At the time, knowing someone's name didn't immediately tell me anything about them - I had no preconceived notions, no immediate reactions to learning someone's name. In the adult world, this is impossible - both because we know more about where we came from, and because of what we learn through the media about the world around us.

We enter the world with a series of blinders over our eyes, and as we get older they are slowly stripped away until we see the world as it really is, with an inescapable history of struggle and division over trivial differences, and some wounds that never heal.