Black Opal Books recently
asked on Facebook how we go about naming characters.
There is a lot that goes
into naming, starting with remembering which character has which name as you
write.
I may rename a character
later, but when shehe first arrives in the story, I use the initials of hisher
role in the story for the name.
The physics professor is
Paul Powell, county sheriff is Charlene Sellers, funeral director is Fred
Davis, and so on.
I try to allow for age and
ethnicity in those names. For instance, an Italian funeral director would be
Franco De Fiore. That is not important in the beginning, though. I don’t want
to slow down the writing by contemplating too hard on a name. When a funeral
director suddenly shows up, I take the FD initials that come readily to mind. After
all, the point of this initial naming is for ME to remember who is whom.
It’s easy enough to
remember your main characters, but the lesser ones can be a problem. You don’t
want to just guess and end up with more than one name for the same character,
nor do you want to take the time to look it up in your index. The initials
approach makes it easy to remember that the Spanish teacher is Serena Toscano.
Of course, if you don’t normally use Spanish names, and thus Serena Toscano is
really not easily conjured up, it’s perfectly okay to name her Sue Taylor. She still
has the initials of Spanish Teacher.
More tomorrow.
John
Robert McFarland
Daughter
Katie Kennedy’s Learning to Swear in
America will be published by J. K. Rowling’s publisher, Bloomsbury Press,
in 2016.
Author
guru Kristen Lamb says that author blogs are counter-productive, that a blog
must be “high concept.” I have no idea what that means, but just forget about
JUST WORDS being an author blog and consider it ‘high concept.”
My
novel, VETS, about four handicapped
and homeless Iraqistan veterans who are accused of murdering a VA doctor, will
be published by Black Opal Books in 2015.
I tweet as yooper1721.
I also write Christ in
Winter: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter. http://christinwinter.blogspot.com/
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