What’s in a Name? (Hint: I Have No Idea)

By Mike Maillaro | July 30, 2026

One of my absolute greatest flaws as a writer is that I am spectacularly, aggressively awful at naming things.

Case in point: I spent three full days trying to craft a clever, witty title for this exact post before throwing my hands up in defeat. You’re reading it under a title that essentially amounts to a white flag.

When I first started working on my novel, the working document sat on my desktop for about two weeks was simply labeled "Story." To be honest, part of me still thinks that’s the most honest title I’ve ever come up with, but I can’t imagine the book ever getting published with that name.  At one point, I pivoted to The Story of Me, pulling directly from a great line of dialogue spoken by my lead, Allison. But it felt a little clunky. That naturally evolved into some combination of The Story of You (which I kind of liked) and The Story of Us (which is probably the best fit, even if it's been used by roughly ten thousand other books, movies, and Taylor Swift songs).

If titles are hard, naming characters is an absolute nightmare for me. I rely heavily on random internet name generators, and even when I find a name I like, I have a desperate inability to let it stay put. My character roster is basically one giant, unending game of musical chairs.

A brief peek behind the curtain of my madness:

·         Allison started her fictional life as Maya. Then she became Claire. When I finally settled on Allison, I felt guilty throwing the old names away, so I recycled them for her roommates. But then I got bored of Claire and swapped her out for Paige. Oh, and early in the book, Allison wears a name tag that reads "Sam" to keep stalkers off her trail. So at this point, she’s practically a one-woman witness protection program.

·         Nay’s name was also Sam in early versions of the book, just because I thought I was being clever by having the shop owner share the same name as Allison’s alias... but then I got rid of both Sams entirely.

·         Ethan has always maintained his pen name, Ethan Blackwood. But his real name was originally Ethan Hart, until I realized Allison Hart sounded way better for her, so I stole his last name and gave it to her instead. He briefly became Ethan Crumb before I settled on Ethan Crump. Then I had an encounter with a real Ethan Crump, panicked, and felt I had to change it again. I tried Ethan Krump with a K to fix it, hated it, and circled right back to Crump. In my head, his legal married name ends up being Ethan Hart anyway, even if the manuscript hasn't admitted it yet…

·         Ethan’s middle school crush Amelia Chan was originally Chloe Chan. But when I started working on my second book, I realized I had accidentally named the main character of that book Chloe Chen. So Ethan’s crush was changed to Amelia Chan (borrowing the name of a friend’s RPG character). Then I realized that Amelia Chan and Chloe Chen were so similar that they really could just be the same character.  I did end up using the name Chloe briefly for an assistant at the "Handler’s Club," who I then renamed Anna Beth in the final draft. The final score: I had three different characters named Chloe at one point... and zero Chloes in the final draft.

·         Moira Vance got her surname because Allison originally had a stalker named Jason Vance. I cut the stalker from the book, but I liked the surname too much to let it die on the cutting room floor. Moira actually didn’t have a last name until well into the writing process.

·         Leo was originally the name of a minor character in the Handler’s Club, but I ended up stealing that name for Allison’s dad, which then got passed down as a family name to her son, so the original Handler's Club character got demoted to Marcus.

·         Victoria Thorne was actually a guy in early drafts (I’ve been digging through old files and genuinely can't find what his name was! I think it was Paul…something like that). But I realized that having a man offer Allison a job might imply romantic rival vibes that I was never trying to create, so a gender flip and a fresh name solved the problem.

At this point, if my characters ever gain sentience, their first order of business won't be confronting their traumatic backstories, it will be suing me for causing them severe identity crises.

One last thing I have noticed… when the name is right for me, it tends to stick, and it is hard for me to get rid of. Once Allison became Allison, I never thought of her as anything else. That was the problem with my Ethan Crump crisis, too. That was the right name. I could not force myself to change it, because anything else just wasn’t right. He couldn’t be Ethan Crumb or Ethan Krump or anything else. It was Ethan Crump. Period.

So I guess that’s the silver lining in all this madness. Finding the right name might take a maze of internet generators, stolen surnames, and three scrapped Chloes, but when a character finally claims their true name, there’s no turning back.