Jaycee Woods

Usually, I don’t care about character names when drafting a short story. There are exceptions like Hiro (a Japanese ghost), Chappo (a vengeful Apache warrior), The Butcher (an American Tamerlane), Chad (former lothario looking for marriage), and Nemesis (vigilante) as they were part of a story series. Also, I have had a few archetypical characters across draft stories with a shared name like Valerie, Iris, Monique, and Dr. Sydney Friedman (a psychiatrist).

Wanting to build a shared story universe across all my drafts using unique character names, I don’t want to have 15 different female characters all named Mary as the one and only Mary sets up Chad on all his misadventurous blind dates. Although the painter named Purple, who dated the wife-seeking Chad, still has Mary as her referenced given name. Consequently, the ex-wife Mary in the Silas the lawyer origin story will be renamed during editing.

Renaming is an early part of my editing process; for example in “Cat Seeks Rat” the boy Billy was renamed Skippy as it suited his demeanor and eliminated a conflict with the Brit expat named Billy, who had the demeanor of a bully, in Hiro’s first story.

While editing after rereading the whole draft story, a step in my process is to rename the working title of the story; thus, my feral child story now has a working title of “Nature’s Foundling.”

In the original draft of that story, the wild child was named Hibaman, which seems to be derived from the Arabic word hiba, meaning gift. I decided to set the story in feudal Japan, so I had the villagers name her Sutako, which is Japanese for foundling, per Bing’s translate. By the end of the story, the male lead decides to name her Kedakai, meaning noble as in having good moral character (HT: Microsoft’s Copilot for helping me work that out).

When formatting the draft of that story, I named the previously unnamed male lead Shingo from a list of popular male Japanese baby names. During editing I realized that a Lord would be called by a family name, so he became Akamatsu, sourced from a list of daimyo clan names in the Yokohama area during feudal times.

While unimportant during drafting, names become more significant to me during editing as then I feel as if I know the character and story.