naming conventions

would a Keira by any other name smell as a sweet?

Not starting with a cover letter this week, but don’t worry, we’ll get back there!

One of the questions I get a lot as a writer is, “How do you come up with names for characters?!” I have some writer friends who spend a lotttt of time thinking about who a character is as a person before figuring out a name that feels fitting. They don’t want to sign that proverbial birth certificate until they have the whole picture of the person. Not me! Once I know their name is Greg Everly or Jenna DeWitt or Tate Washington, that’s when they become real. And I only know, like, seven names, so as soon as I think of a character who belongs in a story, I give them the first name that pops into my head and roll with it. And that’s always worked out—until last week.

I had to send in a couple writing samples for a director to consider for a project. Amazing! Love to be considered! The producer said, “Send whatever you have that best portrays REDACTED and relates to REDACTED theme, doesn’t matter what format.” And lemme tell you, REDACTED is in my wheelhouse—two of my favorite samples circle REDACTED thematically. So, I popped those PDFs onto that email, hovered the mouse over the send button, and then something stopped me. Waaaait, do both these scripts have a pivotal character named Trevor??

They sure fuckin’ do! The first of my Trevors shows up in an hour-long pilot whose first draft was written deep in the panny—in either the fall of 2020 or, at the absolute latest, spring of 2021. Trevor 1 is a highly-ambitious college journalist who’s a potential love interest/foil for one of the show’s protagonist. He’s chasing a potential story on college admissions fraud, just as my main girlie learns her family pulled some shady shit to get her into school.

A year later, after that project had been filed into the deep recesses of my mind and my iCloud, I started writing a feature about teen girls grappling with loss and change under the long shadow of 9/11—in the form of a brash teen comedy, obvs. And you better believe when it came time to name the cute guy the protagonist’s best friend ditches her for in the middle of act one, I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the one and only teen boy name I seem to know: Big T!

They’re such completely different people in my mind that I’m honestly still surprised they share a name. I’ve rewritten both scripts multiple times over the last couple years, but I guess I’ve never worked on them both around the same time? Or never thought of them as tandem samples before, since one’s film and the other’s TV? Idk!

Trevor 2 was born in like 1989 and grew up in Chelsea. Trevor 1 was born circa 2005 and lives in Inwood. Trevor 1’s a Charli XCX fan who knows exactly what he wants. He’s always chasing a story, and the seat as Editor in Chief of the college paper, even when he’s three beers deep at a party. Trevor 2 is a more passive guy. A youngest sibling, he likes to observe others before he plays his hand, and he’s book smart, but never leads with intellect. Trevor 1 is always leaning in. Trevor 2 really took that Fat Joe song “Lean Back” to heart.

Double Trevor is especially weird because I have never met someone in real life named Trevor. To me, that name exists only in concept, not in any physical form. Ergo, all teenage boy characters are Trevors in some way, shape, or form, apparently??

For a moment, I thought about opening up one of the script files and doing the ‘ol “control F” to run find and replace on the name Trevor—he could become John or Carlo or Ben in one of those projects, right? But the threat of missing a nickname in dialogue that I’d forgotten about (“Yo, Trev, are you gonna make room for the rest of us?”) was too high, and I couldn’t take the risk.

Then, I thought about adding a line in my email (told you we’d circle it back to a form of cover letter) with the scripts attached along the lines of: “I just realized that both these stories have characters named Trevor, just so you know that I know!” But sometimes, less is more. And if whoever’s reading those samples (if they even read from both! People are busy!) is distracted by a second secondary Trevor, I’ve got bigger problems on those pages, right??

Even so, I am going to have to retire the name Trevor from my arsenal. RIP to all the future Trevors I might have written. May you live on in the Jeffreys and Ians and Robs of the future.

BONUS VISUAL: