Cellar door.

A journalist said those two words to J.R.R. Tolkien during an interview.

When I hear cellar door, I imagine the room where Christmas decorations spend eleven months of the year. Tolkien went a different direction.

Selador.

From that, he said, I might think of a name, ‘Selador,’ and from that a character, a situation begins to grow.

Suuuuuch a Tolkien answer, and I love it.

Give him two ordinary words and he wanders off with a person who does not exist yet. That person needs a problem. The problem needs a place to happen. Pretty soon Tolkien is several thousand years deep in imaginary history, deciding what this person’s great-great-grandfather called a tree.

I call this Name It First.

Tolkien seemed to work this way constantly.

One day, while grading more than 200 exam papers, he found what he later called a blessed blank page and wrote:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

He had no idea what a hobbit was, and that left him with the much more interesting job of finding out.

Smaug came from the old Germanic verb smugan, meaning to squeeze through a hole. Tolkien called the name a low philological jest, which is professor-speak for I made a dragon pun and I regret nothing.

Then there were the languages.

Depending on where you draw the line between a language and a dialect, the usual count lands around fifteen. Quenya. Sindarin. Khuzdul. Black Speech. Some became working languages with grammar and vocabulary. Tolkien even gave them thousands of years of imaginary history. Others stayed as sketches and fragments.

He once compared discovering Finnish grammar to walking into a wine cellar filled with a kind of wine he had never tasted. Finnish helped shape Quenya. Welsh helped shape Sindarin. The sounds carried a mood; the mood suggested a people; and once the people existed, they needed a past.

He built ancient versions of languages that did not exist.

(your side project is doing fine 😅)

By the time The Fellowship of the Ring appeared in 1954, Tolkien had already spent nearly forty years developing his Elvish languages, and he kept revising them for the rest of his life. A change in the language could rewrite thousands of years of Middle-earth history. A new piece of history could send him back to the grammar.

In a 1955 letter, Tolkien finally gave away the method:

The invention of languages is the foundation. The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse.

The languages came first. Middle-earth second.

Tolkien was not standing above Middle-earth with a finished map in his head. In that same letter, he said the Mines of Moria had begun as a mere name. Strider surprised him when he appeared in the corner of the inn at Bree. Tolkien had never heard of Lothlórien until the story reached it. Even Saruman seems to have just appeared.

Half the time, he seems less like the all-knowing architect of Middle-earth and more like the first person allowed to stumble through the world.

I love all of this because I usually do the exact opposite.

I like to name things at the end.

I build the product, outline the newsletter, make the slide deck, and argue about the offer. Somewhere near the end, I remember I need to name the thing.

At that point I open ChatGPT and ask for 100 clever names that sound innovative, trustworthy, premium, slightly rebellious, and somehow still have a dot-com available for $12.

Eleven seconds later, I have a list, and none of the names make me want to follow them anywhere.

AI will happily keep naming the thing forever. The harder part is noticing when one name makes you sit up a little straighter because you can already see what belongs inside it.

A good name is bossy.

A tiny creative director.

I know because Christian Story Lab has been bossing me around for years.

I wish I could tell you the name arrived after a disciplined positioning exercise involving market research, a color-coded spreadsheet, three whiteboards, and one person in the room saying “north star” too many times. I was really trying to hold storytelling, marketing, faith, weird creative experiments, and whatever new thing I had built that week in the same place.

Christian Story Lab was the name that could hold all of it.

If I had called this Payton’s Marketing Newsletter, I would be writing a very different newsletter right now. (I would also probably be avoiding it.)

Christian Story Lab gives me permission to put Tolkien, Disney, AI companions, Old Spice, Brandon Sanderson, Bible storytelling, a family conversation app, and a half-built game in the same room. Once I called it a lab, all of those interests had somewhere to go.

I can hear the objection.

Okay, Payton. Tolkien had forty years to invent Elvish. I need to name this thing before Friday’s meeting.

Fair.

Tolkien used names as starting points.

A name gave him something to react to. Selador sounded like somebody. A hobbit sounded like something that needed a hole. Each name pulled the next question out of him.

Try that with whatever you’ve been calling “the project.”

Give it a working name and let it earn the right to survive. (Maybe wait before ordering 5,000 embroidered hats.) For now, ask whether it makes the next decision easier.

Then open a blank page and write:

If this name is true, then we need…

Write the sentence five times and finish it differently each time. Don’t try to sound strategic. Write the first honest answers.

Here is what that looked like with Powwow.

Powwow is a family conversation app. Once I named it, the word started suggesting what the product should do.

If Powwow is true, then we need…

A question worth gathering around. A way to save the answers so my boys can hear what their four-year-old selves said years from now, without turning dinner into data entry.

Now the name can help judge features.

Circle the answer that gives you the most energy, and build that before the logo.

Have you noticed how early naming shows up in Genesis?

One of Adam’s first recorded creative acts is naming the creatures God brings to him. He has to pay attention before he can name anything, then accept some responsibility for what he sees.

Tolkien heard cellar door and found Selador.

I wrote Christian Story Lab and gradually discovered a newsletter focused on storytelling and creativity for Christian founders, marketers, and creative leaders.

Maybe the strategy can wait until tomorrow. Tonight, give the project a name that makes you want to open the document again.

Name it first.

Then build the first thing it asks for.

If you’d like to lose the rest of your afternoon in Tolkien research, start with

Until next time,

Payton ✌️