On the Difficulty of Giving Fictional Names to Real People
The email arrived on a Wednesday afternoon, between a council tax reminder and a newsletter from a bakery I’d visited once in 2018 and never managed to unsubscribe from. It was from a woman called Christine — not her real name either, I suspect, but that’s rather the point — who wrote to tell me that Margaret from the post office was upset.
I’d written about Margaret six months earlier. She was the woman who’d served behind the counter at the post office on Abbeydale Road for what I imagined was the entirety of recorded human history, and who had once refused to sell me a book of stamps because I’d said “cheers” instead of “thank you” and she felt I wasn’t taking the transaction seriously. I’d written the piece as a gentle tribute to her exacting standards and the disappearing world of counter-service formality. I thought she’d have been flattered. I’d changed her name, obviously. Margaret wasn’t Margaret. But I’d chosen Margaret because it felt right — a name that belonged to a woman of a certain generation, a certain bearing, a certain willingness to tell you you’d filled in the wrong form.
The real Margaret, Christine told me, had read the piece. She’d recognised herself immediately — the stamp incident, the formality, the specific brand of professional disdain — and she’d been offended. Not by the content. By the name. “She thinks you’ve made her sound like a Sunday school teacher,” Christine wrote. “She’s always hated the name Margaret.”
I sat with this for a long time. What I’d done, I realised, was a kind of identity theft in reverse: I’d taken a woman’s actual life and grafted it onto a name she despised. Worse, in some ways, than using her real name. At least if I’d called her Jean, she might have felt seen. Instead I’d made her into someone she’d spent sixty years not wanting to be.
The Dinner Lady Years
This was not my first mistake with names. In the early days of writing about my own life, I took an approach I can only describe as catastrophically lazy. I gave everyone the same six names, all of them belonging to the dinner ladies at my primary school. There was a Maureen, a Barbara, a Glenis, a Carol, a Janet, and a Heather, and between them they covered every woman I’d ever encountered. Men fared slightly better only because I had a wider palette — the dinner ladies were, regrettably, all women — but the principle was the same. I wasn’t creating characters. I was applying stickers.
The problem became apparent the first time I tried to write about two women in the same piece. “Maureen said this, and then Maureen said that” — it read like a Beckett play performed by a single, increasingly confused actor. Worse, it stripped every scene of its specificity. A Maureen in a Sheffield post office and a Maureen in a Leeds hospital waiting room and a Maureen on a National Express coach to London are all, somehow, different women. But on the page they blur into a single composite Maureen who has done too much, been too many places, and doesn’t ring true in any of them.
There was also the problem of tone. Heather, one of my primary school dinner ladies, had a specific quality — she was the one who surreptitiously gave you extra chips if you looked thin or sad — and every time I called a stranger Heather, I was importing that chip-dispensing warmth into situations where it didn’t belong. The woman at the Co-op who once threw my change at me because I’d put my hand out too early was not a Heather. She was something sharper. But I didn’t have a sharper name in my repertoire, so she became Heather, and the piece lost a dimension.
The first time an editor queried one of my names, I knew the approach was broken. “Is Glenis a real name?” she asked, referring to a woman I’d written about who ran a jumble sale at the church hall. I was affronted. Glenis was absolutely a real name. Glenis was the name of a woman who could fold a duvet cover in under thirty seconds and who once told me, with great specificity, that my mother’s skirt was too short for a Tuesday. But the editor was American, and to her, Glenis sounded like something I’d invented — a name from a part of Britain she’d never encountered, carried by a woman she couldn’t picture. The name was right for Sheffield but wrong for her. This, I realised, was another layer of the problem. Names are place-specific in ways that aren’t always legible to people from other places. A name that feels authentically, recognisably local to you might read as fictional to someone from another region, or another country entirely.
What a Name Carries
What I’ve come to understand, slowly and through a series of small embarrassments, is that a name is never just a label. It’s a dense little packet of information: region, era, class, the aspirations of parents, the weight of a grandmother’s maiden name pressed into service as a first. In South Yorkshire, names tell you things before the person even speaks. A man called Trevor who works at the tool hire shop on London Road is not the same man as a Tarquin who runs a gallery in Sharrow Vale, and the difference isn’t just occupational. Trevor was probably named for an uncle who worked at Steelpec. Tarquin was named for a character in a book his mother read during pregnancy, quite possibly while eating something with quinoa in it. You can hear their whole lives in two syllables each.
A name places you. Not just in the country but in the decade, the social stratum, the specific kind of school you went to. Susan and Susan are different people depending on whether their mothers were the sort who added an extra ‘a’ — Susana — or the sort who went the other way and called her Sue. Kevin is a name that carries an entire cultural moment, a brief window in the 1960s and 70s when every other boy in South Yorkshire was called Kevin, and now you can hear a Kevin and know he’s in his late fifties and has opinions about whether a chip butty should have butter on the bread. He thinks it should. He’s right.
Then there’s the question of nicknames, which in Britain operate as a social shorthand that given names never quite manage. A Margaret might be Maggie to her friends, Marge to her sisters, Mrs H to the people at the post office, and “the woman from number 42” to the neighbours who’ve never quite caught her name. Each version is a different relationship, a different intimacy, a different social contract. When you choose a pseudonym, you’re also choosing which version of the person you’re claiming to know — and the version you choose says as much about you as it does about them. Calling someone Margaret when everyone who actually knows her calls her Marge is a declaration that you don’t know her at all, that you’ve observed her from the outside and imposed a formality she doesn’t wear in her own life.
The Authors Guild maintains detailed guidance on writing about real people that addresses this precise tension — the ethical and legal dimensions of depicting identifiable individuals in personal non-fiction. Their resources, shaped by the professional writing community’s hard-won experience, focus on protecting real subjects while maintaining narrative authenticity. It’s a reminder that the obligation isn’t just legal. It’s moral. The person you’re writing about didn’t ask to be a character in your essay. The very least you can do is make sure the character you create from them is one they’d recognise if they ever stumbled across it.
But here’s the complication no amount of professional guidance can fully resolve: you can’t simply ask them. You can’t go back to the woman at the Co-op and say, “I’m writing about the time you gave me the wrong change and then refused to acknowledge it, and I need to know what name you’d prefer I used when I describe the specific way you sighed at me.” The whole ecology of these encounters depends on their ordinariness. The moment you make someone aware they’re being observed, the observation becomes useless. You become a journalist. They become a subject. And the small, unguarded truth of the interaction — the sigh, the shrug, the way she called the next customer “love” without looking up — evaporates like breath in a cold room.
The Difficulty of Invention
So you invent. And the invention has to be good enough that it feels true without being true, specific without being identifiable, respectful without being sanitised. This is considerably harder than it sounds.
For a while, I tried a systematic approach. I kept a notebook — a proper paper one, because the whole point of this exercise is that some things shouldn’t be searchable — divided into columns: real person, key characteristics, invented name. The invented names I drew from a mental catalogue of names that belonged to the right region and the right generation. A woman of seventy in South Yorkshire could be a Dorothy, a Brenda, a Pauline, an Eileen. A man of sixty could be a Malcolm, a Barry, a Dennis, a Ray. I was building a casting directory for a theatre of the everyday, and the casting had to be precise.
The problem with the notebook method was that I’d start second-guessing myself. Was Dorothy too gentle for a woman who’d told a teenager to stop vaping in the queue at Greggs? Was Barry too cheerful for a man who’d been sighing at bus timetables since 1987? I’d spend forty minutes choosing a name for someone who appeared in three sentences of a 2,000-word essay. I was, as my father would say, polishing a brick.
I went through a phase of trying to find names through more structured means — not out of enthusiasm for automation, but because I was stuck, and stuckness makes you reach for things you’d normally dismiss. I looked at character name generators of various kinds, from the literary to the absurdly fantastical. A character name generator aimed at fiction writers, for instance, can produce something that sounds like it belongs in a novel. What it cannot produce is something that sounds like it belongs on Ecclesall Road on a wet Tuesday. The gap between what a generator produces and what a specific street in a specific city requires is the gap between data and life. Names aren’t generated. They’re inherited, shortened, misspelled on school registers, shouted across playgrounds, mumbled in introductions at bad parties. They arrive in a person’s life already carrying history, and your job is to find a name that carries the right history.
What I settled on, eventually, was something closer to listening than inventing. I’d think about the person — their posture, their clothes, the way they held their body at the till — and I’d wait for a name to arrive. Not construct one. Wait for one. It sounds pretentious, and it is, but it also works. The woman at the Co-op who threw my change wasn’t a Heather and she wasn’t a Margaret. She was a Val. I don’t know why. She just was. The name arrived the way the right word arrives when you’re writing a sentence and you try three wrong ones first: not through logic but through a kind of acoustic recognition. You hear it before you think it.
Ray
There’s a further complication, one I think about more than is probably healthy. When you write about someone regularly enough — when the same person appears across multiple pieces, becomes a recurring figure in your internal landscape — you develop a relationship with the invented version of them that is, in its own peculiar way, real.
The man who feeds pigeons in Norfolk Park has appeared in three of my essays. I’ve never spoken to him. I don’t know his name. But I’ve given him one — Ray — and the name has become, for me and apparently for some readers, inseparable from the man himself. I’ve had people ask me after him by his fictional name, as though he were a mutual acquaintance. “How’s Ray doing?” someone said at a reading once, and I knew exactly who they meant. I also knew that Ray’s real name was probably not Ray, and that the real man had no idea he was being discussed by strangers under a name he’d never heard.
This is the strange intimacy of the pseudonym. You know someone — their habits, their schedule, the particular angle at which they scatter bread, the way they nod at the dog walkers in the morning — better than you know some of your own relatives. But you don’t know their name. The name you’ve given them is a fiction wrapped around a truth, and the fiction has, through repetition, become its own kind of truth. If I met the real pigeon man tomorrow and learned his name was actually Keith, I think I’d be disappointed. Not in Keith — in the gap between Keith and Ray, the gap where three years of quiet observation has built a person who doesn’t quite exist but who I know better than Keith.
What makes it stranger is that the invented name, over time, begins to colour the real person. I’ve started to think of the pigeon man as Ray even when I see him in the park. He is Ray to me now, in a way that feels dishonest and yet somehow more honest than not naming him at all. To observe someone for three years and never give them a name in your mind is to keep them at a distance that feels more exploitative, not less — as though they’re a specimen rather than a person. The name, even though it’s invented, is an act of recognition. It says: I see you, I notice you, I’ve thought about you enough to give you a name. The fact that the name is wrong — that his real name is probably Keith or Brian or something I’d never guess — is almost beside the point. The gesture matters more than the accuracy.
Names carry class in a way that almost nothing else in British life does so transparently. The Institute of Education Sciences, through its work collecting and reporting education statistics, documents how demographic patterns track with educational outcomes across generations. The data is American, but the principle translates, and names are among the most legible markers of those patterns. They’re not neutral. They arrive in the world already encoded with information about the people who chose them, the place they were chosen, and the future the choosers imagined for the child. A name can signal aspiration, tradition, rebellion, or indifference. When I name a character, I’m not just choosing a word. I’m choosing a social position, a set of probabilities, a life that the real person lived but the fictional version has to embody in shorthand.
This is why the wrong name unravels everything. If I call the post office woman Margaret, I’m telling you she’s a certain kind of person — Church of England, probably, a woman who irons her tea towels and has a drawer specifically for batteries — and if the real woman was a Jean, a Jean who wore leopard print and had a motorbike in her youth and once told a man in the queue that he could mind his own business, then everything I’ve written about her is sitting on top of a fault line. The details might be right — the stamp incident, the sigh, the formality — but the name has undermined them all. The reader who knew her, if there is one, feels the wrongness immediately, the way you feel a draft in a room before you’ve found the window it’s coming from.
I’ve got better at it, I think. Or at least I’ve got more deliberate. I no longer use dinner ladies’ names. I no longer give everyone the same six labels. I try to find names that feel like they belong to the specific street, the specific era, the specific social world of the person I’m writing about. I try to honour the real person by inventing someone who could plausibly be them — not a disguise, but a parallel. A woman who might have lived the same life under a different name.
The Margaret incident taught me something I should probably have known already: that names matter to people in ways that are not entirely rational and not entirely explicable. Margaret didn’t want to be Margaret. She wanted to be herself. And the best I can do, as someone who writes about real people under invented names, is to invent names that the real people might have chosen for themselves — names that carry the right weight, the right region, the right year, the right sound. Names that, if the real person ever read the piece, would make them think: well, at least he got that right.
I haven’t been back to that post office. Not because I’m afraid of running into the real Margaret — or Jean, or Val, or whatever her name actually is — but because I’m afraid I’d get her name wrong to her face. After all this careful thought about the ethics and craft of naming, I suspect I’d walk in, open my mouth, and call her something completely wrong. Some habits, it turns out, are harder to rename than others.