Why My Characters Aren't Named Tony

There's a list taped to the wall over my desk. It's names I'm not allowed to use. Tony's on it. So are Vito, Sonny, Paulie, Fredo, Silvio. When a new character walks into a book, the first thing that happens isn't that I describe him. It's that I check his name against the list, and if it's on there, he doesn't get to keep it.

People think that's a strange way to work. It's the least strange thing I do.

Here's the problem with naming a mobster Tony. You don't have to write him. A reader meets a Tony and already knows him — the gut, the tracksuit, the mother, the panic attacks — because they met him years back in somebody else's living room, on somebody else's TV. Same with Vito. Put Vito on the page and the reader hears a cat and a tomato garden and a voice doing forty years of impressions. You didn't create a character. You rented one, furnished, from a landlord who's been dead since 1972.

That's the trap, and it's baited with sugar. The famous names come pre-loaded. They arrive carrying somebody else's meaning, and for about four seconds that feels like a gift — look, the reader already cares — until you notice the reader cares about the other guy, the one from the movie, and yours is just wearing his coat.

The handles are worse. "Bugsy." "Lucky." "The Bull." A man called the Bull walks onto the page fully explained. There's nothing left to find out about him, because the name already filed the report. And a character you can't discover anything about is a dead character. Might as well be a lamp. The reader's eye slides right off him, because you told them everything before he opened his mouth, and you told them in a word you stole.

So the names go on the list. And the list does a thing for me I can't quite do for myself. It takes away the costume.

When you can't call him Paulie, you have to build the guy. You have to sit there and work out who he is until the reader believes him with no shorthand at all — until they know him by how he holds a coffee cup, and what he won't say, and where he puts his back when he sits down in a room. The ban isn't a restriction. It's a crowbar. It pries you off the easy thing and makes you do the work, and the work was always the only part that mattered.

What I reach for instead are names that sound like they came off a boat and spent forty years in a mill. Names off the parish rolls, not the studio call sheet. A Partanna. A Stopiak. A Maldese. Names a priest could read at a funeral without a single head in the pews turning, because everybody there grew up two doors down from a family that had it. Those names don't come pre-loaded. They don't do the work for me. That's the whole reason I want them — they leave the entire man standing there unbuilt, waiting, which is the job I signed up for.

There's a deeper thing under all of it, and it's why the list keeps getting longer. Every name on it is a name somebody grabbed because it was there. The nearest one. The default. And writing a book worth the paper turns out to be, mostly, a long fight against the default — against the first word that shows up, the first image, the first name, all of them arriving early precisely because a thousand people wore them out ahead of you. The list is that fight, written down, tacked to the wall in the one spot where it's easiest to lose without ever noticing you lost.

So, no. Nobody in these books is named Tony. Not because Tony's a bad name — because Tony already has a face, and it isn't the one I'm trying to show you.

The man in my book has a name you've never heard off a screen. It's painted on a mailbox on a street you've never driven down. You want to know what he's capable of, you're going to have to knock.