What's in a name...
- WIldeSage
- Jan 25, 2021
- 5 min read
Updated: Jan 28, 2021
Protagonist
I had to seriously think about my main character’s (MC) name before I started writing. She always had a definite look in my mind and a personality that I had to work with. I only ever thought from her first person narration, which meant, I didn’t know her name, but I knew the love interest was always going to be called Emmanuel (but I’ll get to that later). So… I knew she was going to be physically tiny but feisty with auburn hair. She was going to be working as a front-of-house staff member in a fancy-schmancy restaurant. That was my MC in a nutshell before I even wrote a word down. So, I considered going for the obvious and giving her a moniker because of her hair colour. Rose, Ruby, Amber, Phoenix- were all considerations. Then I was kind of leaning towards Scarlett, because, I don’t know… I must have been watching the Avengers franchise around then. I could picture Black-widow and her red hair as a female figure I could physically connect to my character. But… the word scarlet, in Dublin, is an Irish term for saying something is shameful or embarrassing. Example: “Oh, I am SCARLET! I said hello to a hot guy who was only waving at his friend behind me!” Basically, it means that your face goes a scarlet red colour out of being flushed and embarrassed. So, that didn’t suit my MC. Then I thought of Ginger… it was spicy, it was feisty. But in the U.K and Ireland, having red-hair can be perceived as a negative thing that is playground ridiculed. “Look at the ginger!” “Ginger-minger!” or… “Ging-er”, just to get that insult out even quicker for ultimate impact. However, over in America, Asia and most other places, see having red-hair as an attractive advantage. I certainly love red-hair on male or females, even though I am blonde myself. But in the U.K and oddly enough, in Australia red-hair is widely ridiculed (links to forums below). So I didn’t want to give my MC any kind of negative conductions to her name from the get-go. I just adore red-hair, it’s so rare and just gives a special air to my character. It makes me think of passion, magic, mystery, beauty and… BIG SEXY Vikings. Anyway… Scarlet for me going off on a tangent like that! 🙄 ** rapidly waving a silk fan in front of my flushed face like a timid Victorian lady** So... I stepped away from the physical appearance for name ideas, and decided to focus on the book’s theme. I realised that maybe I liked the name Ginger because it was food-related, and the book was going to centre around restaurant-life and her obsession with cookbooks and the celebrity food show scene. As soon as I researched food-inspired names, I KNEW it was the direction I was going down. Initially, I zoned in on the name Clementine. Firstly, because it just suited. It was food-related, and a clementine could relate to a tone of red hair. Well, kind of… at a stretch. Secondly, and mainly… I liked it because it is Kate Winslet’s character’s name in ‘The Eternal Sunshine of the spotless mind’, which is just one of my ALL time favourite movies. So, I jotted it down as I scrolled through the list, confident that I had found my protagonists name. Anise, Brie, Julienne, Nori, Pepper… Then I saw it… Sage. Sage. I don’t know why, but it clicked like a switch, and I knew it was my name.
"Being named after a random herb was not easy to grow up with! But, thank you…”. “Well, Sage could also be to describe someone admired for the possession of wisdom, judgement and experience...” he nodded thoughtfully, before adding. “Or it could just describe a tiny, little random herb... I don’t know!”. Sage blinked up at him in surprise, “Did you just make a joke about my name?” she asked in breathless amusement, feeling entirely thrown by the first full sentence she ever heard him speak outside of the kitchen. “Maybe...” came the short reply with a smirk.
And… that was how that evolved. It fitted into her tiny but mighty persona. It gave Sage and her love interest an ice-breaker to talk about. But it also had a deeper meaning that would come through in later books. A sage, in classical philosophy, is someone who has attained wisdom. The term has also been used interchangeably with a ‘good’, and ‘virtuous person’. Which fits into how her character develops. I also loved the imagery between the green colour of sage and her red hair. It adds a nice contrast to me. HOWEVER… weird sidenote… It was only about two years, and two books later, I realised that as someone who’s day-job is working in accounts and payroll… my entire accounting system is called SAGE. HOW THIS SKIPPED MY SUBCONSCIOUS FOR SO LONG actually still baffles me. It was a definite, a-ha moment. My MC’s name was right in front of my eyes for YEARS. It felt like faith. The Love Interest
Okay, so this was a little easier. I knew I needed a strong name that could be abbreviated into another respectable identity. Not so much, Richard… because I didn’t want to call my guy Dick or Richie. The background story was that the love interest’s father is a prominent, world-renown French Chef. Basically, he is the Senior to the junior name I was looking for, as MY character would be named AFTER him. This was to allude later that my character felt the pressure to live up to his Father’s famous name. -Their namesakes’ legacy. It also had to be stereotypically French. Example: Dominique to Dom (That was a front running because I liked the idea of comparing to Dom Perignon) Alexandre to Alex Matthieu to Matt Sebastian to Seb (This was my initial choice because I was obsessed with Lala Land) But… I settled on, Emmanuel to Manu. It just felt like it was such a transition from the Father’s name to a son trying to forge his own identity in the industry, almost like a complete transformation of the namesake. It was a name I had never heard of before. I heard of Manny, or Mani, but never Manu, and I liked it. Then, I had the task of completing this apparently world-famous name. So, I just googled ‘rich French family surnames’. Manu Le Grand Manu Lafayette Manu Dubois Manu Dupont And then I found it. Bellon… a surname that is taken from a nickname meaning 'for a fair or handsome one'. The family name was originally derived from the Latin adjective Bellus, which means beautiful. If I was going to have a French love interest… then he was most certainly going to be a handsome one. So, there it was… Manu Bellon. Later in the book, I kept his mother and sister's name French and starting with the letter E, to have a little theme from the Bellon family style. ❤️️❤️️❤️️
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