Once you’ve named a character, that almost always remains their name the whole way through the story. Even if that’s often not how things work in real cultures.

Actually, there are two layers here, one of which is just about which name gets used in which context. My younger self was temporarily thrown, reading Dorothy Dunnett’s historical novel The Game of Kings, by the protagonist (Francis Crawford of Lymond) being variously addressed or referred to as Francis, Mr. Crawford, Lymond, and the Master of Culter — not helped by me not knowing at the time that “Master of [place]” was a Scottish way of referring to a nobleman’s heir. But we already mostly addressed this angle on things in Year One‘s essay, “The Etiquette of Names,” so I won’t dwell on it too much now.

Instead I want to look at names full-on changing, whether that’s acquiring a new one to add to the existing set, or replacing the original name entirely.

This most frequently goes hand-in-hand with a change in one’s life status, especially one that involves any kind of rite of passage. Makes sense: you have transitioned to being a different kind of person in society’s eyes, therefore you ought to be called by a different name. (And yes, I’m using the word “transition” there very deliberately, as gender transitions often involve a name change.) Probably the single most common version of this involves laying aside a childhood name to take up an adult one — and that one isn’t too hard to work into a story, because the majority of fiction written for adults is also about adults, whereas children’s fiction is about children. If the inflection point between those two states comes up, it’ll mostly be as backstory for the adults, a concluding moment for the children. You don’t have to ask your reader to accept one name for your protagonist for the first half of the book, another one for the second half.

Whether marriage involves a name change depends on the society. In past ages for English-speaking countries, not only did a married woman traditionally change her surname, but she would be formally addressed and referred to as Mrs. John Clements, rather than Mrs. Alice Clements. That’s not universal, though, on either the given or surname fronts. Meanwhile, some countries deploy the teknonym “Father of [Child]” or “Mother of [Child]” once a couple has kids: in Arabic, for example, it’s Abu Malik and Umm Malik. It’s a courtesy address rather than a replacement of the adult’s name entirely, but it’s worth noting as a social sign that you’ve transitioned from Not Parent to Parent.

Where there’s a monastic tradition, it is hugely common for monks and nuns to take new, religious names along with their vows. For Catholics, this often means a saint’s name — though not always; there was no St. Teresa until the canonization of the Carmelite nun Teresa of Ávila — and sometimes more than that: they might also take a phrase like “of Jesus” or “of the Cross” as a kind of surname, more firmly marking their allegiance to the religious community.

Among Buddhists, you can sometimes be given a dharma name even if you remain a lay believer. Depending on the culture and the tradition, one individual might also have multiple dharma names, perhaps reflecting their degree of initiation (e.g. Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism) or just the passage of time and occurrence of important events in their life. There may be a “family name” equivalent in the form of some component that marks which tradition they belong to, and there may be a requirement that all the components in the name (the characters, where the Chinese writing system is used) come from somewhere in scripture.

Japan has a particular angle on this, in that people are commonly given posthumous dharma names. This is as much or more for the benefit of the living as the dead: by changing the name of the deceased, you prevent the risk of their spirit returning when you speak their old name. The length of the name theoretically reflects the virtue of the deceased . . . but, well, a bigger donation to the temple reflects more virtue, right? (There’s scandal in Japan about temples upselling more expensive dharma names to grieving families.)

Posthumous names in general crop up a fair bit throughout East and Southeast Asia, sometimes because of a link with ancestor worship. Rather than replacing the old name wholesale, something else might be added to it, like various flattering adjectives or epithets. But you may or may not be allowed to add those off your own bat; in the case of emperors, it might be their successor who decides what the previous ruler will be called after death, or the most powerful religious authority. For people farther down the chain . . . ? I don’t know if this how it happens in reality, but for fiction, you can absolutely imagine a world in which loftier epithets, like longer Japanese dharma names, require a larger “donation” to the authority in question.

Speaking of emperors: these guys are extremely likely to change their names. European royalty might actually be an exception, in terms of how rarely they do so — though even they, with multiple given names, might choose which one they actually use. (Queen Victoria, for example, was baptized Alexandrina Victoria.) Elsewhere in the world and history, it’s been extremely common for them to take regnal names/throne names/various other terms for the same basic concept: you can’t be on such familiar terms with the emperor as to call him by his personal name!

Sometimes this regnal name is the same as the era name, the calendar being divided up by reigns rather than a continuous upward count of years; in other cases, important events might cause a reigning emperor to declare the end of one era and beginning of the next, while keeping their own name the same. Japanese emperors technically go by no name whatsoever while reigning, and only receive the era name as their own after they die: while they’re alive, it suffices to just say “his Majesty the Emperor.” In other traditions, the ruler gets a posthumous name that’s different yet again from his regnal name — stacking up monikers like layers of political stratigraphy.

And finally, there are professional names down at lower levels of society. East Asia again has a running tradition of “artistic names,” where painters or poets or whoever might adopt a special name for their work; so far as I can tell, that’s much more widespread of a practice than the nom de plume of European societies. (Reasons for using such a name range from anonymity to recognizability to branding.) But this can extend to less elite entertainers like geisha or kabuki actors — the latter of whom may aspire to inherit the name of their master; one of the most famous onnagata peformers of the current kabuki stage is Bandō Tamasaburō V. The point there is not to exalt yourself as an individual, but to show that you’re upholding the lineage in which you’ve been trained.

We tend not to deploy these things too often in fiction — and I include myself in that “we”! I may create situations where my characters go by different names depending on context, but I have an extremely hard time convincing myself to say “this character you’ve known as A will be called B for the rest of the story.” I get too attached to names, and so swapping them out feels too much like I’ve replaced Character A with someone else.

But sometimes, that’s exactly what’s happened in the story. When the transition should matter, when the character has left their old life and identity behind . . . then yes, maybe it’s time for a new name.