The Name Autism

'Nomen est omen', but literally, in literature.

No matter how much people wish to deny it, there are certain elements of truth when it comes to name determinism.

It could be viewed from a purely socio-economic perspective; as in, a child named MacKinleigh carries a specific aura pertaining to lower middle class in the US South region, therefore will probably grow up in a certain childhood in a certain predisposed, pre-determined trajectory of life which often includes teenage pregnancy by an older man, or marrying an army guy at the age of nineteen and divorcing him at twenty-three.

But this isn’t about American stereotypes. It’s about foreshadowing in fiction through the character names.

I see them as small Easter eggs that an average reader will probably not catch onto, but is oddly rewarding to anyone who does realize it. It’s also a method to help the writer come up with a suitable name.

To try to explain it, it comes down to the graphical and visual identity of a word, in this case, a name.

If we write down a name in a lined notebook, there are certain parts of the letters that peek through the bottom line, and the upper baseline of the word. I will try to explain this to the best of my ability, which I suspect won’t be good enough, but all I can do is try.

g j p q y

The upper baseline is broken by a lot more letters!

b d f h i j k l t

The pesky ‘j’ is accounted in both.

When we break down letters in this fashion, we can use names to signify both plot and character development within the simple visual structure, and to such a degree that it’d be consider major.

Let’s take the name Edward as a first example. A classic name in modern literature, really.

The full blue line is the base that the name lays on. None of the letters in the word ‘Edward’ break the base line, except the capital E, and the 2 d’s break the upper line.

So here’s the actual meat to this naming convention.

The base line, or the blue line in this case, is the physical representation of the character’s inner world; their steadfastness, their focus on the goal, their emotional and mental state throughout the written work. In the case of Edward, it would imply no straying of the path laid out in front of him, and little emotional turmoil in reaction to the plot.

And the plot would be the dotted upper line.

The dotted upper line is the representation of how the plot treats the character, from start to finish of the name and the plot.

So in Edward’s case, we have something like this.

The plot for Edward starts off on a high note, due to the capital E upper ledge being long and straight, but it quickly turns into chaos because of the chasm created by the 2 parallel lines of E; which then builds back up into a high created by lowercase d, and it again descends twice into the holes of w. From there, it’s smooth sailing over a r and part of d, until problems arise again at the very end. But, because the base line is not broken, no matter what happens to Edward, it’s like water off a duck’s back. Or he is constantly in mental anguish and that is his baseline that he does not deviate from all that much throughout the novel / poem / short story / whatever.

Magda would, by this logic, have a horrible childhood and/or early story development, absolutely horrendous behavior, emotional state of ups and downs, and the plot would be bashing her over the head in the first quarter of the story because of how capital M is designed.

Then, the plot would mellow out in the mid part (dotted upper line), but her emotions would be out of order due to the writer’s mistreatment because of the g arch out of line, and she’d come to accept the abuse, even with the plot bump of d just before the end.

The problem with this method is that there are very little Western names written in Latin alphabet that contain lowercase g j p q y, so for the romance(-adjacent) writers, this method of visualization through letters can also be reversed, depending if the writer wishes for a very emotional back-and-forth with little plot, so the line representation would simply be the very opposite of what I explained—the dotted line representing inner world, and the base line representing plot.

Admittedly, I have not yet published any work that used this method of naming that intertwines with plot structure, but it is how I named all my main and major characters in the novel that I am in the process of writing. As I had all this in mind, and honestly became a bit obsessive about, I managed to come up with quite unique and original names that sound natural for the characters’ backgrounds. Once my novel is ready for the world, I will add them in this section for proof of success, I suppose.

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