I see dead fonts
It’s one of my quirks. I also didn’t get the ending of The Sixth Sense until I worked backwards with all the red clues in place. In hindsight, a fiction writer should have known better. The foreshadowing was not laid on with a light brush. I also hate Arial and am angry that it’s now apparently the default in Google Docs. I’ll switch this essay to Times New Roman before I finish it.
Signs and billboards are my constant writing prompts. I see what I’ve dubbed the “Laverne and Shirley font” on a sign and know the business has been around for awhile. If a sign has mismatched, multiple fonts, it makes me cringe and want to paint over it. I’m also fascinated with abandoned sign remnants, like faded Stuckey’s signs slowly sinking into roadside trees. This may be because of childhood vacations where we “drove straight through” and the only entertainment was spying license plates and watching interstate markers.
I called the phone number posted on an interstate billboard once because it was blank, except for the number. My daughter and I speculated on what the number might be first. A lost person. A million dollar treasure hunt. A man leaving a clue for his wife as she drove angrily across the country. It turns out the truth was much less exciting; it was simply the billboard company’s number. In hindsight, we should have followed the signs to the fork in the road attraction instead.
I’ve also driven miles down sideroads to find “Missionary Cowboy Primitive Churches of the True Enlightenment,” Vidalia, Georgia; and the Bush’s Baked Bean’s Welcome Center, museum, gift shop, and cafe. All because of a sign or twelve.
While I’m constantly playing the “I see a weird combination of names on that interstate sign” game, I’m also fascinated by billboards. The “don’t have an abortion” adult-teeth baby ones. The ones that flash. Buc-ee’s bathroom humor. Apples in six miles. The last rest stop for 67 miles. Burma Shave ads would have been my roadside candy. Who puts up these signs? Who writes the copy? Who paints them?
I often name my story characters after interstate road signs. The ones for my perpetually-in-progress novel, anyway. The ones no one has seen (yet) because I only have a parade of Canterbury Tale characters bouncing around in my head.
Baxter Gainsborough
Harlem Appling
Warrior Robbins
Eva Falkville
They might stay in the draft or not. Those four are the baby names your spouse can veto but you love because they’re interesting, even though you’ll probably end up calling your kid Emily. They’re also instantly interesting people. My weird sixth sense about signs outlines what they wear, their hobbies, jobs, families, homes, life paths, if they would be friends or duel each other. I am prone to think this quartet might alternate between loving and fighting.
I live in the South so there are many name options on signs. I remember the same in the Midwest though, so I don’t think it’s a limited thing. These are the people and the names that those people decided to name the places they settled. Difficult and Dreadful, a pair of towns that are often in tornado paths, made their way into one of my stories.
Sometimes, the town and street names are less complicated on the surface, but carry history. Nolensville, near me, is named after the Nolen family that settled it. However, the town symbol is a broken wheel. There is literally a permanent wood wheel with a jagged piece missing in front of a cemetery. The lore says the Nolens were traveling in their covered wagon and the wheel broke. And they decided to stop and live where it broke. I can only guess that the dad was hopelessly-lost and the mom ran out of snacks and travel bribes for the kids.
Why not just fix the wheel and keep going? That would be like if every time my car has broken down or run out of gas in say, Mississippi, that I just decided to stop and live somewhere outside of where Oxford is and named it after the only fancy university I knew, or my fancy pet hog.
Street signs can be haunting in their own way. When I see Woolco Way, I can hear “we want to be your favorite store” playing in my head. Near me, there are short roads that lead to farms; the street names are transparently the farm owners at one point. And, sometimes people leave behind little jokes too. Every time I see “Farfaraway” and “Dunmovin,” I giggle a little thinking about the emotions behind those signs.
In the midst of a sea of fonts that climb in my head like a Sesame Street alphabet episode, I’m currently haunted by one billboard in particular. There’s a lawyer that advertises all over Alabama and into Tennessee. He’s either not good at comma usage or has chosen to market himself with a comma error.
“Call me Alabama”
That three word pronouncement is on most of his billboards. I wonder if he’s implying we should call him “Alabama” as his nickname between his real first and last name? Like a country lawyer or business owner that didn’t want to be “Bubba” or “Hound Dog?” Or did his Tesla break down in Alabama and he gave up and decided to simply live there? Is he dead and the billboards are his way of communicating with his family? Or maybe his first love was named Alabama Appling after her great-great-great grandfather Harlem “Alabama”? To be fair, his last name is very long and it’s much easier to just remember the tagline. The advertising is obviously working on me.
I haven’t called that accompanying number, but my name isn’t Alabama either.
Prompt: How do you name your characters? Where do you find inspiration? Do you make up entire stories about stores and their owners when you see unique or vintage fonts? Is your notes app full of potential character names?
As you do your daily tasks and errands, look more closely at the signs, fonts, and potential wonderments around you. Write a story about your local mom-and-pop grocery. Concoct an interstate love story for the person who put up the peeling billboard in the trees. Write the story of why homeowners were “dunmovin.”
Write down all the interesting street or interstate city names that you see for a week. Create a story connecting two new characters, from those names.
Finally, do some research on how and why the towns or streets are called what they are. I usually try to do this step last because it’s more fun to fill in the signs.
