An Acronym Name Usage

[MattyK]

In the story I'm currently writing (I'm not going to call it a book yet...don't know when I'll start but it's not yet!) I have a character who's name is an acronym. Is there a proper way to refer to him? My choices are Jimmy, JIMMY or J.I.M.M.Y. I have no layout plan at all for the story yet but at this point I'm thinking I'll probably briefly introduce him and then offer up his back story later on; something like "Jimmy was actually J.I.M.M.Y which stood for...".

Does that work or is there a better way to go about it? Basically, I don't want to have to type J.I.M.M.Y every time I use his name and if a character uses his name and I type "Hey J.I.M.M.Y!" it would be like the character was actually spelling out the name instead of saying it!

Hope this all makes sense and that I've posted this question in the right section of the forum!

 

[Interference]

When people address it, "Hey, Jimmy" would be fine as they would be using it as its name ("Open the pod-bay doors, please, Hal."). When referred to in the narration, J.I.M.M.Y. would be more accurate - like "Napoleon Solo was one of U.N.C.L.E.'s best operatives."

 

[Ursa major]

It's a long time since we had to put all the full stops in acronyms (if that was ever a hard and fast rule). So you don't have to use J.I.M.M.Y. but could instead use JIMMY.


By the way, if you have more than one POV, some of them may know JIMMY is an acronym, while others may know the character only as Jimmy. You might try - as an experiment - using this in the respective POV narratives as well as in any dialogue.

 

[Interference]

I'll wait till you stop editing before I say "What about the C.I.A. or N.A.T.O. or NAS-- err ... you might have a point, there, actually ?"

 

[Ursa major]

I was going to explain that the BBC uses NATO - rather than N.A.T.O. - but when I looked at the BBC News website, I found they use Nato.


(But they do use CIA with no full stops.)

 

[MattyK]

My last serious(?) experience with writing was a couple of pantomime scripts for an am-dram group a few years ago so POV wasn't really an issue. That being the case, I don't really know how my writing style will develop with regard to it. I like the idea of people simply calling him (well, it's actually a computery sort of thing) Jimmy in dialogue and then referring to him as JIMMY in the narrative. Don't know why but I did want to refer to him using the full stops at least once. I suppose a way around this is to describe him and have it stamped or labelled about him.

As for Nato and CIA, I imagine it's related to how they are said. We say Nato instead of spelling it out as opposed to CIA which we don't refer to as Cia (or people might thing we were saying "yes" or "hello/goodbye" in Itallian!?) which probably means I'm better off working as Interference decribed.

Any way, thanks for all the input folks!