NAMING CHARACTERS 4: The
Promises and Pitfalls of Technology
I once read something from
Stephen King about how he changed the last name of a family in one of his
books. He had chosen a good name for them. It fit. But it was long, and they
were in the book all the time. He got tired of typing that long name all the
time, so he shortened it to a one syllable, four letter name.
To young writers, that is
so strange. Length of name is never an issue, in this age of cut and paste, and
the “replace all” function on computers. But in the days when writers worked by
hand, and then had to produce a typed manuscript, that was a real concern.
Technology makes a
difference in writing. For years I did my first draft by hand. It worked nicely
in any setting. You couldn’t sit in a coffee shop and type, even with a
portable, because the clacking would make other customers crazy and they would
react by throwing you, and your typewriter, into the watering trough. No one
objected to a yellow pad and a blue pen, though.
Because I wrote so much by
hand, that was the way my brain worked. I could not compose any other way. If I
sat down at the typewriter at home, where they had to let me type, at least
when others were not sleeping, I could not compose. My brain wanted a pen and
paper. Typing was only for putting into legible form what I had already
written.
Then came computers. But
they were big, and sat on desk tops. And their clicking sounded much like old
typewriter keyboards. So I still used a computer just as a super typewriter,
for final drafts, not for composing.
When laptops came in,
though, and I sat with my stiff-back pad in the coffee shop and watched others
use their laptops, and realized that when they got home, they didn’t have to
spend the rest of the day putting into the computer what they had written by
hand, I just bit the mouse and decided I would learn to compose on a keyboard
instead of with a ballpoint. It was not as hard as I thought it would be. Once
you get going, it’s nice to let the fingers fly. Bob Hammel, the great sports
writer, says that when he sat at the keyboard and wrote, he felt like a concert
pianist, notes flying from the ends of his fingers to compose a symphony.
So technology makes a
difference in how we write, including what we can name characters. Or it used
to. Not anymore. With computers, you can name someone the longest bunch of
syllables in the language, and all you have to do is use an abbreviation and
then do “replace all.”
But wait. Be sure that
abbreviation is not something that would normally appear in other words,
though. For instance, if you name a character Norman, and just call him Norm,
or Nor, as you write, when you do “replace all” later, the word “normal” will
come out as normanal, and north will be normanth. If you decide that Nat needs
to be Tom and do a “replace all,” national become Tomional, and nature becomes
Tomure.
There was a church where
the secretary did the bulletin for funeral masses on the computer. It was fast
and efficient, since the mass was the same every time. She just replaced the name
of the deceased from last time with the name of the current deceased, via
“replace all,” which was fine until the name of the last deceased was Mary, which
is why the new funeral bulletin kept referring to “The blessed virgin Edna.”
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/
Baseall season is almost
here. If you like baseball poetry, take a look at “Frosty & the Babe” http://www.baseball-almanac.com/poetry/frosty_and_the_babe.shtml
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