Names come last

People sometimes ask how I name characters, as if it's the first thing I do. It's nearly the last.

When I start on someone, they get a placeholder, usually whatever they are: SMITH, or OLD WOMAN AT WELL, or, for one long stretch last spring, MAN WITH OPINIONS ABOUT FENCES. I write them under that for weeks. I write what they want, what they're afraid of, how they talk when they're tired, what they would never say out loud. I write scenes that will never be in the game. I find out whether they're funny. Only when I'd know them across a crowded room do I go looking for what they're called.

The reason is that a name is a decision, and it makes other decisions for you. Call a woman Agatha and she's already somebody's aunt. Call a man Rook and he's already wearing a long coat. If I name someone on the first day, I end up writing toward the name, and the name was only a guess. If I wait, the character tells me. That sounds mystical. It isn't. By the time I know someone well, most names are plainly wrong for them, and choosing among the few that are left is short work.

There are practical reasons too. In a big game, the world has rules for names: which sounds belong to which country, what a farmer is called and what a lord is called. There's a long list of names other writers have already used, and a longer list of names that turn out to mean something rude in one of the languages the game is translated into. Somebody checks. I'm grateful to that somebody every single time.

The risk of waiting is that placeholders stick. Everyone gets used to them. A character I'd called GRUMPY BAKER for two months finally got her real name in January, a good one, and people still call her Grumpy Baker in meetings. One of the artists has written it on her concept art, very small, on the corner of her apron.

I think this is part of why the Earthsea books got so far into me as a kid. In those books your true name isn't something handed to you that you grow into. Someone has to see it in you first. That's the order I believe in. You can't name a person you've never met.

So when you see a character in something I wrote, and the name fits, it's because by then I knew who they were. When it doesn't fit, it's probably because a producer needed it by Friday.

Did your name fit you, or did you grow into it?