Name That Character
For authors of non-fiction, I suppose that character names are a relatively straight forward matter because the names already exist, and for authors of fiction, I suspect that the naming of characters can be fun as authors bring their creativity and imagination to the stories they develop.
For me, however, as I walked a sometimes-indistinguishable line between non-fiction and fiction, the naming of characters in God, Geezers, and Golf proved to be something of an odyssey.
Through the first several dozen versions of the manuscript, I used the real names of people whom I had encountered in leading the senior adult ministry at Red Mountain Community Church in Mesa, Arizona, because an objective of the work was to bless those who had blessed me. At that time, there were more than 100 named characters in the story.
During one of my initial encounters with publishing industry professionals, I was advised that in order to use the real names of people, I would need to obtain their permissions to do so. Perhaps apart from a certain profession, no one is fond of “litigation,” and I’ve found that to be uniformly true among those working in the book creation industry. Naively thinking that I was on the verge of launching my work (which didn’t occur until a few years later) I consequently chose to fictionalize the names of all people and most of the locations that existed in the novel at that time.
Moreover, I realized that there were just too many characters in the story, so I reduced that number to something in the sixty-person ballpark (four main characters plus the supporting cast). In some instances, I removed characters and the stories associated with them altogether. In other instances, I retained some accounts by attributing activities to other characters who remained in the story. And finally, by deploying words like “wife” and “brother” instead of people’s names, the character reduction task proved to be easier than I originally expected.
As the book development journey continued, my penchant for nit picking bloomed, additional draft versions of the manuscript were produced, and the character name issue moved into the background for several months. By the time I submitted the work to an editor for a developmental assessment, I had become quite comfortable with the fictitious names of the novel’s characters.
Then at some point during the developmental edit, knowing how the story had been crafted, my editor suggested that I revisit the subject of character names because the people I had written about (and their families) would be blessed to see their real names in the book. She further contended that a blend of real and fictious names (a concept I had not considered) could work.
Accepting that counsel, I reached out to dozens of people, and the vast majority of those whom I contacted provided immediate, favorable responses regarding the use of their real names. But some issues emerged as I grappled with character name decisions.
At the time I was contacting current and former senior adult ministry participants, some of them were dealing with very serious medical challenges, and others were facing end of life circumstances. I didn’t think the timing of my request would be very good, so I stayed with fictious names for people in those circumstances.
Regarding deceased persons, the publishing industry advice I found indicated that it is generally okay to use the real names of deceased individuals, and I did so in some instances. However, with respect to some people, I requested permission to use their real names from relatives and received approval. With some others, I requested permissions to use real names, received no responses to the inquiries, and therefore used fictitious names.
Finally, with respect to certain individuals, there were other reasons to use fictitious names.
Armed with permissions to use many real names, I marched back into the text using convenient “find and replace all” commands, which worked great except for some characters who had the same first names as other people. The mess I made was mercifully unraveled during the subsequent line edit process, and in the final version of the story, hopefully everyone is who they are supposed to be.
The images of numerous cast members whose names appear in God, Geezers, and Golf are displayed below. The images of a handful of others whose names appear in the book (Bob Fox, Kyle Fox, Preston Hancock, Dave Lindstrom and Della Zwick) can be seen on the Red Mountain Community Church website.
