Choosing character names that sing to the reader

‘Be like a polished stone; don’t give them anything to hang onto.’

That was the inspiration behind my choice of name for one of the bad guys in By the Light of a Lie; he of the carefully constructed false identity. Not who he appears but no chinks in his armour. The quote was supposedly from Richard Nixon which stuck in my magpie brain although I can’t track it down anywhere. Nixon certainly knew about lying, one of the essentials in his political toolkit, viz his advice to a young associate. ‘If you can't lie, you'll never go anywhere.’

Do names matter? Writers agonise over them for days, change their minds half way through and have to laboriously replace them. Do they need to be evocative? Names with no connotations over time (with great success) take on a life of their own – Harry Potter immediately opens up a world of witches and warlocks. Jack Reacher is the guy who solves problems the quick n’ easy way with a gun. Amazon did invoke a feel of immense spread (world’s largest river) and aggression (female warriors) but seemed a strange choice initially for online selling. Now it’s gone into common usage, and like a swear word, it has lost its original resonance.

Stones intrigue me – hard, bleak, dark, enduring; only the extreme heat of volcanos can rent them apart; or, over aeons of time water which wears them away. They preserve memories of days long past with mummified fossils. And through their surprisingly porous molecular structure, they can also, according to Don Robbins’ theories*, trap event memory like a natural video recorder, producing ghost-like sightings. [*The Secret Language of Stone.]

Without getting too Manichean about it, despite or maybe because of their Luciferian and Saturnian nature they are a necessary component to life. In more Jungian terms, you can’t have the light without the shadow. The eternal battle between good and evil can be symbolised as stone versus fire (inspiration/creativity) and water (emotion).

The old alchemists whose purpose was to turn lead into gold, either literally or spiritually, said at the end of the process there would be a residue of base material which had no hope of transformation. They called it the ‘Terra Damnata’, which they threw away. Yet even waste dross survives. An indestructible paradox.