Names and Their Power

I've said before that I'm not good at talking about a project while I'm still working on it. I don't know what might change between when I talked about it and when it's finished. I don't know if the energy I put into talking about it will drain energy away from the writing. If I say too much, what if I feel like I've mostly told the story and there's no reason to write it anymore? 

But I do want to share something about what I'm currently working on. No, not the one that got pushed aside for now. No, not the one that I'm not seriously working on but my mind keeps whispering little hints of inspiration for. The one in the middle. The one I've been immersing myself in and coming up for air just so I can dive back in and keep writing! 

If you follow me on Bluesky, you've probably seen me posting little bits for the daily #WIPSnips prompts, so you know it's a fairy tale retelling. Names get mentioned, but I haven't talked about how I've been choosing names for characters. Jack's name was an obvious choice for me. There are plenty of Jacks in fairy tales and nursery rhymes. I just made them the same Jack. Other names have taken some work, and some of them have required research.

Ruby's name just took a little thought. It's pretty obvious who she is right from the beginning. Her name is Ruby and her grandmother is a wolfshifter. (The term for a werewolf in my story.) Little Red Riding Hood isn't really Little Red Riding Hood's name, and it doesn't work for an adult woman working in a tavern in a small village. I could have given her any name. Her name could be Michelle and you'd still know who she is in the story.

So, why Ruby? Because I don't want to wander too far away from how we usually identify these characters. Names have power, not just as identifiers, but also because they have meaning. Fairy tales weren't originally stories to keep small children busy and happy. They have lessons. They are stories with power.

I'm not writing the retellings as short stories. This is a novel, and the stories weave together. They have different lessons in my versions, but lessons still. And I want to honor the stories they originally came from. Ruby is a name that makes it so that she will always be wearing red in a way, no matter what colors her clothes are.

Some of the characters do have very different names from how we usually come across them. Let's be honest - a lot of that comes from Disney movies. If you go looking through the stories the Grimm brothers collected and merged through writing down their retellings, you don't always find the same names as in the movies. 

(Me being myself, I feel like I have to point out that not all of the popular fairy tales were passed along to us by the Grimm brothers. A lot of them were, though, and there are mentions in my story of a couple of brothers in the Grimm family having lived in the village.)

Jack's wife comes from her own fairy tale, but it's not one of the stories I'm retelling. Instead, there are little hints here and there. Things that make sense within the context of the story, and hopeful have another layer of meaning when you know what you're reading comes from fairy tales. Her name isn't what it is in a movie, though. I had to simply choose one of the many variations of her name in the stories. 

Widow Hubbard's sister is someone very familiar to us, but I needed a new name for her. I also needed something to connect her to the name we know within the story. It's easy to change "Old Mother Hubbard" to "Widow Hubbard", but her sister's name doesn't change as easily. I ended up choosing a name with meaning that made it easy for Widow Hubbard to make a joke about how her sister sings. That's all I needed to connect her to the old name.

Just as there are wolfshifters, there are bearshifters. I really want to include the family of bearshifters, but I don't want to force them into the story. They may or may not show up. If they do, you'll know them by their names - Arturo, Bernadette, and Orson. Yeah, Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and Baby Bear are all literally named "bear". 

Pinocchio took some work. His story is important to me, and it doesn't start with him being a puppet brought to life. He had a name before things got to that point. I didn't know how to change it, though, because I didn't know what the name means. A little research, and now I know what kind of wood Geppetto carved him from - pine! My character's name is Keifer since that name also has its... um, roots... in "pine". 

I admit I'm just not really familiar with Italian names. I had to look up some things about Geppetto, as well. I could have kept the name. I'm choosing names that don't all come from the same region of our world. I just know it would bother my brain to read a retelling that keeps talking about Geppetto and his wooden son, Keifer. No, he needed a new name.

I found out Geppetto is a variation of Giuseppe, which I already knew is an Italian form of Joseph because I went to high school with someone named Giuseppe. 

On the surface, that doesn't look like an important name to keep. It doesn't carry the meaning within the story that some of the other names do. I thought about changing it to something else, but I don't know why that's the name originally given to him in the story. I don't know if it was purposely chosen for the symbolism that occured to me, which is the idea of Pinocchio's father being a man named Joseph who wasn't his son's biological father, but still very much his father. I don't know for sure that it has that biblical collection, but it's likely enough that I would want to honor that by not changing the name too much. 

That's how Geppetto became Zef in my story. It keeps the meaning, sounds good as "Zef and Keifer", and fits with names of other men of his age group in the village. 

There are more characters whose names I'm not ready to tell you about yet. There is specifically one character that I'd be giving too much away by telling you their name.

I'm working on chapter four. We are, unfortunately, not close to the book being ready yet. I'm really excited about this, though! I know where the story is going even without knowing all the details of how it will get there yet. I hope you'll trust me with these beloved characters now that you know even names are chosen with care.