Rami Ungar The Writer

I wrote a post not too long ago about the strange coincidence of how the main character of my short story, “Aasif”, has a name that means “apologies” or “forgiveness”. And for those of us who have blogs on WordPress, we might’ve seen the article from Kimberly Packard, “What’s In A Name?” on Freshly Pressed, where she discusses the importance of the names we give characters in our stories (link’s right here if you haven’t read it yet: http://kimberlypackard.wordpress.com/2012/09/18/whats-in-a-name/).

And just now, I found out the name of the main character of the short story I’m writing for my fiction class, Renee, is French for “rebirth” or “born again”, which makes odd sense for a girl trying to establish a new identity for herself after being kept prisoner in a basement most of her young life. I just chose the name because I’ve always thought the name “Renee” carried with it a connotation of strength, like “I don’t care what happens to me, I’m going to get through it!”

I also just checked the name of my main character Zahara Bakur from my novel Reborn City: Bakur is from Abu Bakr, father-in-law to the Prophet Muhammad, one of Muhammad’s earliest followers, and according to the Sunni tradition, the first caliph after Muhammad’s death. I already knew all that from my research into Islam, but I was happy to learn that Zahara’s name means “shining” in Arabic. It makes sense, as Zahara is the main character, and she does “shine” the way for some of the other main characters throughout the Reborn City trilogy. But still, I had no idea when I named her that her name would be so suitable to her!

It’s just weird to me, how I choose these characters’ names based on some aspect or other of the name, and yet there’s a whole other meaning to the same names that I didn’t know about. I’m almost tempted to start looking through every other character I’ve created in the past couple of years just to see if any names have any cool significance I’m not aware of.

But for now, I’m just going to hold off. My short story’s gotten to a good stopping point, at least for this evening, so maybe tomorrow I can wrap it up. In the mean time though, anyone got any funny or interesting stories about characters they’ve given names to and the significance behind those names? I’d love to know.