Do you name characters after people you know? 👀

@the_red_pen OP

1mo ago

Be honest with me. Have you ever named a character after someone you know, and did they find out? I gave a deeply unpleasant landlord in my last manuscript the first name of my actual former landlord and I have never felt more powerful or more nervous about a libel suit. Spill.

10 comments

@emdash_emma1mo ago

I named a warm, generous side character after my grandmother as a tribute and she was thrilled until she read the scene where the character dies peacefully in chapter twelve. She called me, deeply offended, asking why I'd 'killed her off'. I had to explain that it was the most loving death I'd ever written. She's still a little suspicious of me at Christmas.

@typo_terror1mo ago

The peaceful death backfiring is so painfully real. I learned my lesson the hard way: I gave a vain, status-obsessed minor character my coworker's exact name, assuming she'd never read literary fiction. She did. She recognized it. The office was frosty for a month and now I run every name through a mental 'what if they read this' filter, which is exhausting but necessary.

@the_red_penOP1mo ago

My disguise method, hard-won: I keep the rhythm of the real name but change everything else. So 'Margaret Whitfield' becomes 'Eleanor Hartley'. Same number of syllables, same kind of weight, completely unrecognizable. The trick is that I'm not actually naming them after the person, I'm naming them after how the person feels to say out loud. Nobody's ever caught me.

@lowercase_luca1mo ago

Naming them after how the person feels to say out loud is a genuinely beautiful way to put it and I'm stealing it wholesale. I do the opposite and it's risky: I use real names but for characters who are nothing like the person, so my kindest character carries my worst ex's name. It's private revenge nobody will ever understand and it delights me every single time I type it.

@manuscript_mona1mo ago

Private revenge through misattributed virtue is unhinged and I love it. My story is simpler and worse. I named a protagonist after a close friend, fully intending it as an honor. Then the character developed a months-long affair I hadn't outlined. By the time I noticed, the name was load-bearing across two hundred pages. I changed it in revision and the friend never knew how close she came to fictional adultery.

@stetson_dan1mo ago

I have a rule born of disaster: never name a villain after anyone whose wedding you've attended. I broke it once, gave a con man my old college roommate's full name, and he found the self-published book three years later. To his eternal credit he thought it was hilarious and now introduces himself at parties as 'the inspiration for a literary fraudster'. Could have gone so much worse.

@penname_pending1mo ago

You got incredibly lucky with that roommate. I scramble surnames from gravestones in old cemeteries, which sounds morbid but means the names feel period-real and nobody living can sue me. I keep a phone full of headstone photos from a Victorian cemetery near my flat. The downside is my camera roll looks deranged and I once had to explain it to a very concerned date.

@verse_and_vice1mo ago

Cemetery names are the gold standard for historical work, the texture is unbeatable. For contemporary stuff I use the credits of films I half-watch, pausing on the gaffers and key grips. Real names, real combinations, zero personal connection. My current antagonist is named after a boom operator from a 1990s thriller and he has no idea he's now a war criminal in chapter nine.

@chapter_two_curse1mo ago

Film credits are brilliant, the names sound real because they are. I'll confess the one that haunts me: I named a character after my then-partner, the book outlived the relationship, and now I'm stuck doing edits on a manuscript where the love interest shares a name with someone I'd rather forget. The publisher loves the name. I have made peace with nothing.

@wattpad_to_print1mo ago

The love interest named after the ex you have to keep editing is the exact nightmare I needed to hear to feel sane about the landlord thing. Reading all this, the consensus seems to be: honor people at your peril, villains are safer when invented, and cemeteries and film credits are the professionals' secret. My takeaway is that I'm changing the landlord's name before this sees a lawyer.