Notes In The Margin #2: What's In A Name?

There is one part of the novel writing process that fills me with equal measures of excitement and dread: Naming characters.

It excites me because before I start the whole process is full of a shed-load of potential and my imagination can be let off the leash.  The rules are simple.  Find the best name for each character than I can possibly come-up with!  It sounds so simple, doesn't it?

Well, yeah.  That's where the counterweight of dread comes in.  Almost anything is possible.  When faced with a massive blank canvas like that it can become a bit overwhelming and like a child in a sweet shop with too much choice, I sometimes find myself dazed and confused by the sheer abundance of choice.  I usually feel I've made the wrong choice and that a better answer is evading me, hiding out there, somewhere in the creative ether...

Over the last two decades that I've been writing, I've tried numerous methods for finding character names.  They've ranged from looking at the premise of the piece and seeking inspiration from that to literally sticking a pin in the phone book.

I should point out that both methods have had their fair share of success and failures.  360's main protagonist, Nick Hasben, got his name from the starting point of his character considering himself to be a "has-been".  If I say "has-been" enough times, it comes out as "Hasben".

It struck me as a fitting name, so a character's surname was cast.

I'm less inclined to use the phone book these days.  The main reason being is that we don't really see them around anymore.  When I was a kid we had volumes of the things around the house.  Nowadays, I have one book and that's mostly full of area code information rather than names.  I suspect for some younger writers a phone book may already may seem an antiquated name generating tool!

Thankfully, there are Twenty-First Century tools available to the modern writer to help them when inspiration runs dry. I tried the Linux version of Scrivner recently.  Scrivner is an amazingly powerful piece of software for writers.  It's not a word processor, but an application written specifically for writers whether it be for writing blogs, dissertations, articles, short stories, or full-length novels.

Suffice to say for now, one of its many tools is a character name generator.  You can choose to generate either first names, or surnames from different parts of the world, or different time periods (like Saxon), or mix it up and have each name suggested on different criteria, or starting with a certain letter.  Even if you don't use the names it suggests, sometimes it's enough to spark the necessary inspiration for that elusive character name,

Scrivner is far more than just a name generator, so well worth a look if you're looking for something to help organise your writing projects.  It's a fantastic piece of software and warrants a NITM post of its own sometime (other writing software is available of-course).

At the other end of the scale is another, more low-tech, method that I've tried recently. I wrote names that were in the ball-park of what I thought my character should be called on small sticky notes.  Once I had good number of each, I mixed and matched forenames and surnames trying the different combinations, or adding new ones to the mix until something jumped out at me.  As I say, it's very low-tech, but it was a fun way to explore the possibilities.

Also remember, however you find your characters' names, until you publish nothing is set in stone.  They can change at any moment (search and replace permitting).  So even if that inspiration strikes three quarters of the way through the first draft, you're perfectly free to change your mind.  One of the characters in my previous work in progress, The Wickedest War, spent several years called Murray.  A friend pointed out that there were several characters whose names began with "M".  I struggled with the idea that this character that I'd become so used to calling Murray should be called something else.

But reason won the day and Murray's not Murray anymore.  He's Tamblyn. It suits him far better.  It's the name he always deserved.

If you're struggling with finding suitable names for your characters, relax and try to enjoy the freedom to create rather than dread the possibility of messing it up.  Use software, sticky notes, an old phone book, or your own form of creativity.  If you have your own methods, let me know.

Either way, have fun with your name making and you might surprise yourself with the results!

Muse News #2

It's been a busy old few days in chez Gilbert.  Busy, but not complicated so this will be a relatively short Muse News this week.

It had been my intention to get the fourth draft of my current WIP (Work In Progress), 360, finished and ready for my beta-readers by the end of last week.  However, in rewriting the opening third I have discovered I've negated some plot elements later in the story.  They have to go before I can consider the fourth draft complete and in a fit state to hand over to my beta readers.

Also, after initially hacking 30,000 words from the original 142,000 (yeah, it was a mammoth) during the early days of working on the 4th draft, I appear to have inserted another 7,000 back in as new copy.  That means I'll have to cull another couple of thousand to reduce it to be closer to the 110,000 target as well as clear up the loose plot issues.

Consequently, the original allocation of May for beta-reading is a very doubtful now, so I've revised my plans and June will now be set aside for beta reading (beta reader availability permitting).

The only other real news this week is that, as those who read last Thursday's Notes In The Margin will know, I've been dabbling in recording another audio book version of 360. I've only conducted basic tests with my new microphone to establish the kind of sound quality I'll be getting, which is much better than my previous efforts for the second draft.

I've also been trying out some new voices for the characters as I wasn't entirely happy with the majority that I chose to use last time.  If the resulting audio book is good enough then, once the ebook has been published, I might look at pursuing the audio book idea further, possibly with an eye to commercial release, but that is a very tentative "might"! 

For now I musty concentrate on finishing the fourth draft.  My original target for completing it was the end of March, so I'm throwing every available hour at it at the moment so it isn't delayed any longer!

Hopefully by Muse News #3 I'll have much more to report!

Post the Sixth: Tools of The Trade

I found myself thinking this week.  My netbook had slowed to a crawl while the anti-virus software hogged the processor to update its library of digital nasties and neither my browser nor my word processor were willing to interrupt it.  Writer's block I can cope with and many creative-types down the centuries have suffered a dip in productivity because of it.

But dips in productivity due to constant software upgrades is a very twenty-first century problem.

I wrote my first story when I was eight.  It was a nine page epic written in pencil in my school exercise book.  I wouldn't say it was that good, but it was the start of something special.  It must have been special because my teacher had it typed-up, illustrated and two copies put in the school library.  My next attempt at a feature length story, which I started three or so years later, was also written in pencil to begin with but it soon progressed to being written in pen, as befitted a fourth year junior school  pupil heading to the first year of "big school".  The point is, the pen, pencil and paper worked.  If they didn't I got another pen, pencil or sheet of paper.  No upgrades necessary...unless you count a fountain pen in the first year of secondary school as an "upgrade".

Where it all started.  Two of the nine pages of the original
copy of my first serious attempt at writing.
(Photo: The Author)

The pen may be mightier than the sword but it was no match for the typewriter that quickly superseded it - which itself was surpassed by a very basic and none-too-user-friendly electronic typewriter that took one line of text at a time into its limited memory before it would print it out in a variable range of hard to read dot-matrix delivered greys.

The electronic typewriter was out of fashion (not to mention readily-available supplies of ink cartridges) pretty much as soon as I'd started using it.  But that wasn't a problem.  By the time I turned fourteen, I'd become the proud owner of a Commodore 64 home computer complete with a five-and-a-quarter inch floppy disk drive and full-on dot matrix printer.

Post the Fourth: New Kid on the Blog

I should start off by apologising for the lack of posts in the last couple of weeks.  It's been a crazy start to July, some of it good and sadly also some it not so good.  I won't bore you with the details - and I don't thinks this is the place for them anyhow - so I'll just say that hopefully things are back on track and I should be more regular from now on (no sniggering in the back row).

Right, so back to the title.  Yes, it's a corny title, I know.  But frankly, it's very true - and yes, I am referring to the "New Kid" bit not the "Post the Fourth" bit.  Reading around a number of blogs I've discovered how much of a novice I am in this field.