“Some names find you. Some you build. Some are a thank-you.”

On the strange and stubborn process of naming characters

I was driving to work — night shift, dark highway, that particular kind of tired that makes the brain go quiet and useful — when a word surfaced that wasn’t quite a word.

Vitier.

I had been circling something. A character who is all appetite and awakening. Someone who sees too clearly, wants too much, and makes no apology for either. I’d been turning over words like vision and vitality, reaching for the feeling of a man who is perpetually, dangerously hungry for more. And somewhere in the dark between mile markers, those two ideas collapsed into each other.

Vitality. Hungrier. Vitier.
That’s how some names arrive. Uninvited, in the dark, on a Wednesday.

Others take weeks.

Laganimu — the Wolf King — was a commute project. Not one commute. Many. I needed something completely fabricated, something that had never belonged to anyone else, something with old weight and strange music to it. I tried combinations for longer than I’ll admit. And then one night, somewhere in the architecture of syllables I’d been quietly building, I noticed the nickname.

I hadn’t put it there. He arrived anyway.
Sometimes the name knows something you don’t yet.

Then there’s the method of working backwards from love.

Helandriel and Jorithiel are higher angels, and in the tradition I drew from, that order of being takes the suffix -iel at the end of their names — a marker of rank, of origin, of what they are. So I started there, with what they are, and worked toward who they feel like to the people who love them.

Jorithiel is formal. But his family calls him Jo.

Helandriel is ancient and terrible and beautiful. But someone, once, called him Landry.

The nicknames came first. The full names grew around them like bone around something tender.

Not every name carries mythology. Some carry gratitude.

Antonia exists because of a woman named Toni — a real person, a dear friend, someone who read early pages and said keep going at exactly the right moments. Writers need those people. The ones who believe in the work before it’s earned belief.

Naming a character after someone is a quiet thing. Most readers won’t know. But the writer always does.

Anze was originally Logan.

Logan is a fine name. But Logan was an outlier — my principal cast had gravitational pull toward names beginning with A, and Logan kept drifting out of orbit. Then I remembered a hockey player I’d long admired: Anze Kopitar. I’d always thought the name had something — a specificity, a foreignness, a little elegance it didn’t seem to be trying for.

Logan became Anze. The constellation settled.

And then there is Raiciel.
I won’t say more than this: that name was not invented. It was simply written down.

Lydia is the one I chose on instinct and didn’t question. Some names have weight. You meet a Lydia and you take a half-second before you answer — deciding, without deciding, whether she’s someone to trust or someone to watch.

That pause belongs to her character completely.

I don’t have a system. I have a commute, a habit of alliteration, a few people I love, a theological tradition, a hockey player, and a name I was given a long time ago that I finally found a use for.

The characters tell you, eventually, what they’re called. You just have to stay quiet long enough to hear it.

Henley Parks is the author of Three Steps Away, Book One of The Fallen Series.