Hey guys. I am sorry that we have another late post. I got to spend time with my mom on Friday and we spent all day hanging out. I also decided that I try out the new medicine that my doctor gave me. It worked. It worked too well. I should’ve taken a half dose but I didn’t and so I was totally drugged up. In and out of consciousness, confused when people talked to me, hypersensitive to sound, nauseous when I was standing, and a whole bunch of other things. It took the rest of Friday and half of Saturday including sleeping for 11 hours to finally sleep it off. Sorry for how long it took me. But hey, it made it up at all which is an accomplishment in and of itself. So here we go.
Building Better Characters: A Rose by Any Other Name
This is the last topic for this series and next Friday will be the last follow up post for a year and a half. The final aspect of a character is their name. I know that I have briefly mentioned this in previous posts, but I think that it’s time to really buckle down and talk about a character’s name. I think there are several ways to pick a character’s name. I have had all of them happen to me at one point or another.
Sometimes your character tells you their name. In the case with Trenton when I called him Tristen when originally writing the story and I felt like that didn’t fit. Later I realized his name was wrong and he was actually named Trenton. Things like this happen more often than others think. When I speak to other writers they often tell me that their characters choose their names. They could start a story but not be able to get past chapter one because their character is telling them that the name they chose is wrong. If this is you and every single one of your characters in every single one of your stories is like this then I sincerely apologize. It’s really hard to have something like that in your writing.
There is something similar to the first one but it’s different. Instead of your character telling you the name you chose is wrong and then telling you what their name is there are the characters who won’t let you name them at all, but they won’t tell you what their name is supposed to be. I wrote a twenty-four-chapter novel where my main character would not tell me her name. Every time I tried to name her I felt that the name was wrong and deleted it. Eventually I stopped trying to name her and just went with the nickname that her fellow character Dax called her – Bardknight. I wrote the first half of the novel and plotted the second half. One day I skipped all the middle parts of the story and wrote the ending. When I reached the end of the last chapter I was given a name. Her name was Arianna. I was blown away. I wrote a whole story without mentioning the main characters name once. It was an adventure.
The last kind of character naming is when you are blessed with a character that doesn’t have any previous name. You can name them whatever you want, and the character doesn’t interfere! It’s the best kind of character! When a character like this comes into a story there are two ways to name them. The first is by giving them the first name that pops into your head and the second is researching names that having meanings that you want and finding the right one to fit that character.
When I was writing my current novel, I was introducing two characters who didn’t have names. I literally turned to my coworker at work during a break and said, “give me two guy names. One needs to sound posh and the other casual.” She laughed but complied. “Skyler and Donavan.” Skyler the adventurous friend and Donavan the goth kid whose friends called him Donnie were born. These are the easiest characters. You can name them whatever you want.
Some writers research the name of a character when they name them whatever they want. They try to make the name’s meaning match the character. I have only done this twice in the whole twelve years I’ve been writing. One I will never speak of, but the other I am rather proud of. I had a character that I really wanted to name. He was the demon in my story Thieving Heirs. He was contracted to Magpie who was sent to save Prince Asher before he was killed in a coup. Her demon was a demon of shadows and subtlety. It made her a really good assassin. I named him Betzalel (pronounced Bet-za-lel), Betz for short. In Hebrew Betzalel means Shadow of God. It was the perfect name for a shadow demon working on the wrong side of the law.
Naming your character is what really brings a character to life. It’s what helps a reader really remember them after they are done reading. It helps them to talk to other readers about the book long after they have read it. Remember to give you character the right name. And you don’t always have to stick with the name that you give them very first. What else is find and replace for right?
So that’s all I have for this week. On Friday we will have the final post until after I get back. I really hope that you guys will all be here to read when I get back. If not, I guess you’re missing out on awesomeness. Haha. As always,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!