From Queequeg to Flem Snopes, from Kitty Ricketts to Nurse Ratched, books are full of alliterative, whimsical, sly, suggestive, fun character names that tickle the reader’s imagination. We recently collected our top ten character names and asked our friend and artist David Campos-Allen to set his imagination to “paper.” This is what he came up with.And should you feel inspired, please share your favorite character names and illustrations!
Also: Kitty Ricketts from Ulysses by James Joyce :)
“I’ve been to a number of open-mic storytelling nights at bars up and down the East Coast. Erin’s story was funny, nicely tuned, and better delivered than most. But in other ways it was in keeping with the type of tales that seem to predominate at storytelling events — stories that fall under the general category of “The Worst Thing That Ever Happened to Me” and come wrapped at the end with an uplifting insight or hard-won truth.
After Erin finished I started to think about why it is that people gravitate to the most tragic or dramatic moments of their lives when given a chance to tell a story. There are, I think, two reasons. The first is that the storyteller feels an obligation to give his audience something novel — a story we’ve never heard before — which leads him to alight on the most singular experiences in his life. The second is that the worst moments in our lives are precisely the ones we want to be able to capture in a narrative, to master through the process of sharing them with other people.”
Our own Kevin Hartnett visits The Moth.
