Okay so for those of you who aren’t as old as I am and may not remember The Name Game, it was a popular song when I was a kid. Sung by Shirley Ellis who co-wrote it with Lincoln Chase, it had us all walking around singing the rhyming game with anybody’s name. You can find the rules here, and then you’ll be able to waste all sorts of time when you are supposed to be writing. But that is a post for another day.
As an example, here’s my name as sung in The Name Game.
Terrie, Terrie, bo-berrie,
Banana-fana fo-ferrie
Fee-Fi-mo-merrie
Terrie!
Now that we’ve established that I know how to play the game, could someone explain why I have such difficulty naming the folks who occupy my stories.
In my current work in progress, I have a character named Thomas Smallwood, although everyone calls him Skully. (Don’t ask.) Still, he does introduce himself once or twice as Thomas. I chose Thomas Smallwood as his name for a variety of reasons and it absolutely suits him. A more minor character is a stuffed shirt retired Judge who everyone calls Judge Harcroft—no first name—even I think of him as “Judge.” So when another character, who went to grammar school with the judge, called him “Tommy” I was a bit surprised. A day or so later I realized the Judge couldn’t be Tommy because I would never surrender Thomas as Mr. Smallwood’s name. So I went back to the section to change that one reference to the judge’s first name, and noticed a few paragraphs above that was a reference to the local minister who is all over the story line as Pastor Tom. So he had to have a name change. Only Skully gets to keep any variation of the name Tom.
So I raised my eyes heavenward and said to my father, Thomas Farley, (who died in 1966) “cut it out. You only get one character, not every man in the book.”
He laughed. I stuck out my tongue and then made name changes for the Pastor and the Judge. Lest you think I am the only peculiar person in my family, when I mentioned to my daughter that I was losing my touch and got trapped in Tom, Tommy, Thomas, she said, “Oh, don’t worry, that’s just your father.”
So I ask, do you have anyone whispering names in your writerly ear??
Terrie
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