Uncle Jack (Michael Bowen) and Todd (Jesse Plemons) – Breaking Bad _ Season 5, Episode 14 – Photo Credit: Ursula Coyote/AMC

You know the one…

It’s that fishing weight sliding down your throat and landing in your stomach. It’s the one you get when you realize that a part of your story, one which you were quite happy with, was lifted from the fiction of another. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t deliberate theft. The reader will see it and say, “I recognize that! He totally stole that from X.”

There I am, preparing for El Camino by watching the final episodes of Breaking Bad when the badness breaks. Jesse Pinkman has been enslaved by a white supremacist meth gang. His main tormentor is a stone-cold psychopath named Todd. Todd reports directly to the gang’s leader. Todd addresses the leader as “Uncle Jack”.

Doom. On. Me.

I named one of the antagonists in The Grey God Jack Hughes. He is the protagonist’s mother’s brother. There are even a physical resemblance and a nexus to the drug trade. My cunning, ruthless, manipulative character was so heavily, if unconsciously, inspired by the big bad on Breaking Bad that they have the same name. Sigh.

To be fair to Jack Hughes, he’s not a neo-Nazi. He may be a terrible surrogate dad, but he is important to the plot and to Pete. I’m not going to edit him out of the story. I do need to create some space between Jack Hughes and Jack Welker. To start with, Jack Hughes needs a new first name.

The Rules of Names

Character names are crafted. An author can assign a random name as a placeholder, but the reader is due a bespoke name for every character of importance. That doesn’t require the name to be fanciful or even colorful. It means the name has to be right. Or at least not wrong in a way that throws the reader out of the story. It’s important to set reasonable goals.

At this point in my writer-hood, I’m working with the following character name heuristics.

The name should:

  1. Fit the setting. Duh. A modern name in ancient Egypt won’t work.
  2. Match the character’s background. If an Amish woman in the story has a Spanish surname, that’s okay, but the reader may well want some backstory there.
  3. Be distinct from other character names in the story. Unless confusion among Jeff Lebowskis is part of the story, avoid having overlapping names, including Bob/Rob/Robert. I know a family where all the kids’ names start with D and another where they begin with J. I try to scatter names across the alphabet.
  4. Be pronounceable by the intended audience. The reader needs to a least think they’ve got a handle on the name or they’ll stop in their tracks and try to puzzle it out. Westerners are notorious for mangling Asian names.
  5. Sound good every time you use it. Tyrannosaurus Murphy may sound awesome at first, but the reader will tire of it quickly. A name that’s colorful and long is a problem. His friends call him Ty. Tyrannosaurus should be used sparingly.
  6. Not be shared by family or close friends. Even if the character is super-cool. It’s just not worth the hassle.

Working with these guidelines, I’m closing in on a replacement name for Uncle Jack. Progress on this is now imperiled by my desire to write about the adventures of Tyrannosaurus Murphy, PI.