The Catholic Writers Guild

I need a name.

A short story is living in my head. Or should I call it the embryo of a short story — no, it is a fetus, because it kicks and wants to be born. It’s been in my mind for about two years — not a long gestational period for a short story, some have taken twenty years.

The story is about a man and a woman who meet on an airplane heading from New York to Rio de Janeiro. It is not a love story except in the sense that all Christian stories are love stories.

I know the woman. Her name is Theresa. It’s a perfect name for her, written in the old-fashioned way (the modern version would be “Teresa”) that is still often used among her class of people — the long-standing, educated, affluent (but not rich) upper middle-class families who live in Botafogo and similar neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro. Families with origins from all over Brazil, from all over the world, whose roots in Rio go back to when the city was the national capital before the capital moved to Brasilia in 1960. The story is set in the late 1990s when people on planes still talked to one another.

Theresa is Brazilian but lives in New York. She is about 40, quietly attractive, observant, and intelligent. Not intellectual in the technical, academic sense, but very well-read, insightful, with an inquiring mind – as interested in people as she is in ideas.

But I see the man less clearly. He is an American who has never been to Brazil. He is reading an English translation of a novel by Machado de Assis (1839-1908), the great Brazilian writer who was born the grandson of slaves and rose to be the founder of Brazil’s highly respected Academy of Letters. Machado’s novels – set in late 19^th Century Rio— are ironic, humorous, and ambiguous; the American is struggling with that ambiguity.

But who is this American, what is he really like?

The answer depends partly on his name.

For reasons I won’t explain here (or anywhere else), his name begins with an “S.” My first thought is “Sam” – a strong name with biblical roots but also deep American roots (my own roots are old New England Yankee, protestant Irish, and Bavarian). But “Sam” is the name of the protagonist of my soon-to-be-published (I hope) novel, and this man is not “Sam.” So I need another name.

“Simon” seems too English, “Sig” too German. I want this character to be a mainstream, college-educated, white American.

“Steve.” The name clicks into place.

But is he a regular guy who accepts (even prefers) the standard American shortening of his name, or is he one (lawyerly, slightly pedantic?) who prefers to be called by his full name—“Steven”? (I greatly prefer to be called “Arthur” rather than “Art,” so I know this tension).

I’m leaning toward “Steve.”

And now that I know his name, I can envision him more completely. Begin to see his thoughts, his background, his reasons for going to Rio, and his reasons for trying to read this odd foreign book.

Names tell us so much about people.

Scripture tells us that God, Who creates and loves us, calls us by name. We, who are creating and loving our characters, must also take care in calling them by name.

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Copyright 2022, Arthur Powers