Monday, October 31
So I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year. I didn't particularly intend to. It was just that, well, I was planning to start the next novel on November first (Not because of NaNo. Because it's my birthday.) And the New Novel is tentatively YA, which means that fifty thousand words is not half or a third of a finished novel but actually about right. And I never have successfully done NaNo, and it seemed a waste.
I still suspect that 1,700 words a day will be difficult to impossible, but I'm willing to give it the ol' college try.
Currently my novel looks like this:
Which is a big improvement over how it looked two weeks ago:
I'm really digging this "outline ahead of time" thing. No guarantees, but I'm hoping it will help me get through the "ohshit lost the story let's sulk for two months and then go back and throw out half the uncompleted draft" thing which plagued me so badly on the other two novels.
We shall see.
Wish me luck.
I still suspect that 1,700 words a day will be difficult to impossible, but I'm willing to give it the ol' college try.
Currently my novel looks like this:
Which is a big improvement over how it looked two weeks ago:
I'm really digging this "outline ahead of time" thing. No guarantees, but I'm hoping it will help me get through the "ohshit lost the story let's sulk for two months and then go back and throw out half the uncompleted draft" thing which plagued me so badly on the other two novels.
We shall see.
Wish me luck.
Sunday, October 23
I found this question from athenais by way of papersky:
If you write fiction or poetry, how do you name your characters?
Which is... hrm... interesting.
I don't name my main characters. They name themselves. Which is how I ended up with a main called Joey, even though various people have complained that this gives them gender confusion and why don't I call her Josie instead? Well, I tried calling her Josie. She kicked me.
Quite a few of the strong supporting characters are the same. India and Patricia came with names. Thomas came with his name and the information that everyone uses the full version, except Joey, who calls him Tommy. He never objects. I guess she's allowed.
Yes, these people are real to me. Um... that's bad?
Minor characters, on the other hand, are a pain in the butt.
In my first book I went for that old standby of giving everyone hacker-esque descriptive names, which led to some lame names (Havenot, Chaos) and some cool names (Thirteen Jinx) and a lot of "meh" names (Lethe). In my second book there were a lot more people; I'd caught on that the world should not revolve around my MCs. I was also using a made-up universe instead of the Real World, so there were a lot of places to name. And don't even get me started on the technology and slang.
I got sick of it fast.
At first I was just using randomly cool noises that seemed to fit the people (Kalissa, Bothe), mixed with modern names like Joey and Thomas and Patricia. Then I ran out of cool noises and started randomly opening the dictionary and picking suitably obscure words (Tarpan, Siebel - yes, that was in the dictionary, though I may have swapped 'round the vowels. Can't remember.) But even though I had a really big dictionary this was clearly unsustainable. The Census Namer worked okay but didn't entirely satisfy; I needed a blend of real and fictional names. I tried various random name generators. Most sucked. I didn't want characters named Xglubbbaz.
So I wrote my own.
And that seemed to do the trick. I pull most of my minor character names from it now. Sometimes I have to go through a few pages for a picky character, and frequently I tweak what I get, but for grabbing a name for Corporal Red Shirt or Planet X, it's top.
That's my methods. My criterion for naming boil down to:
1) Pronouncable. Xglubbbaz is not exotic, it's dumb, and people won't remember it because it's so weird-looking.
2) Short and spellable. See Rule 1, but also, I have to type the damned thing. It's bad enough that I've stuck myself with a setting that requires so many repetitions of lieutenant - why make life harder yet?
3) Not too like other character's names. Left to myself, I would start every character's name with an A, K, J, or M, which makes them easy to confuse for my readers and for me.
4) Sounds right. This is the final, vague selection process, and I can't even begin to explain it, save to note that letters of the alphabet have characters for me. A's are sharp, alert, active; M's are solid and friendly; O's are also solid but a little dreamy; Z's are rebellious or flaky... and so on. So I see names and they suggest a certain person to me. No, I am not even trying to justify this, I'm flat-out weird, but a lot of writers seem to have this particular weirdness so I can at least claim company.
athenais also asks:
And if you write genre fiction, how do you decide on a naming scheme?
Urm... whazzat?
For my first book, as noted, I used nouns. This is a sort of naming scheme. Except I randomly broke out of it and gave people name-names and then thought first readers who complained about it were being overly picky.
In my second book I used a random jumble of names, some made-up, some not. No one has complained, but then, it's futuristic sf and you can get away with a bit more.
In this WIP I'm making an effort. Not much of one, I'll admit, but I'm trying to make sure that most of the male names end in N,L, or the occasional E, and female names end in A. Then I stare at them for a while and decide whether they sound right for the place.
Sort of a name scheme, I guess.
I don't know why, but this is not a concept that has a real hold on me. I didn't even recognize it as necessary for the early books and I'm struggling to recognize it in this one. In my defense I will note that the girl's names I can remember from my (small, rural) schooldays were Jeanie, Teaka, Ginger, Larissa, Shawana, Sunshine, Katy, Tyler, Tishina, Clarissa, and Sarah. My own name was chosen from a Randy Newman song that my mother liked and my childhood nickname from a Grateful Dead song that my father liked. I retain my "random noises" theory of naming, even if it's illusory.
... and now, back to doing character development for my randomly-named characters.
If you write fiction or poetry, how do you name your characters?
Which is... hrm... interesting.
I don't name my main characters. They name themselves. Which is how I ended up with a main called Joey, even though various people have complained that this gives them gender confusion and why don't I call her Josie instead? Well, I tried calling her Josie. She kicked me.
Quite a few of the strong supporting characters are the same. India and Patricia came with names. Thomas came with his name and the information that everyone uses the full version, except Joey, who calls him Tommy. He never objects. I guess she's allowed.
Yes, these people are real to me. Um... that's bad?
Minor characters, on the other hand, are a pain in the butt.
In my first book I went for that old standby of giving everyone hacker-esque descriptive names, which led to some lame names (Havenot, Chaos) and some cool names (Thirteen Jinx) and a lot of "meh" names (Lethe). In my second book there were a lot more people; I'd caught on that the world should not revolve around my MCs. I was also using a made-up universe instead of the Real World, so there were a lot of places to name. And don't even get me started on the technology and slang.
I got sick of it fast.
At first I was just using randomly cool noises that seemed to fit the people (Kalissa, Bothe), mixed with modern names like Joey and Thomas and Patricia. Then I ran out of cool noises and started randomly opening the dictionary and picking suitably obscure words (Tarpan, Siebel - yes, that was in the dictionary, though I may have swapped 'round the vowels. Can't remember.) But even though I had a really big dictionary this was clearly unsustainable. The Census Namer worked okay but didn't entirely satisfy; I needed a blend of real and fictional names. I tried various random name generators. Most sucked. I didn't want characters named Xglubbbaz.
So I wrote my own.
And that seemed to do the trick. I pull most of my minor character names from it now. Sometimes I have to go through a few pages for a picky character, and frequently I tweak what I get, but for grabbing a name for Corporal Red Shirt or Planet X, it's top.
That's my methods. My criterion for naming boil down to:
1) Pronouncable. Xglubbbaz is not exotic, it's dumb, and people won't remember it because it's so weird-looking.
2) Short and spellable. See Rule 1, but also, I have to type the damned thing. It's bad enough that I've stuck myself with a setting that requires so many repetitions of lieutenant - why make life harder yet?
3) Not too like other character's names. Left to myself, I would start every character's name with an A, K, J, or M, which makes them easy to confuse for my readers and for me.
4) Sounds right. This is the final, vague selection process, and I can't even begin to explain it, save to note that letters of the alphabet have characters for me. A's are sharp, alert, active; M's are solid and friendly; O's are also solid but a little dreamy; Z's are rebellious or flaky... and so on. So I see names and they suggest a certain person to me. No, I am not even trying to justify this, I'm flat-out weird, but a lot of writers seem to have this particular weirdness so I can at least claim company.
athenais also asks:
And if you write genre fiction, how do you decide on a naming scheme?
Urm... whazzat?
For my first book, as noted, I used nouns. This is a sort of naming scheme. Except I randomly broke out of it and gave people name-names and then thought first readers who complained about it were being overly picky.
In my second book I used a random jumble of names, some made-up, some not. No one has complained, but then, it's futuristic sf and you can get away with a bit more.
In this WIP I'm making an effort. Not much of one, I'll admit, but I'm trying to make sure that most of the male names end in N,L, or the occasional E, and female names end in A. Then I stare at them for a while and decide whether they sound right for the place.
Sort of a name scheme, I guess.
I don't know why, but this is not a concept that has a real hold on me. I didn't even recognize it as necessary for the early books and I'm struggling to recognize it in this one. In my defense I will note that the girl's names I can remember from my (small, rural) schooldays were Jeanie, Teaka, Ginger, Larissa, Shawana, Sunshine, Katy, Tyler, Tishina, Clarissa, and Sarah. My own name was chosen from a Randy Newman song that my mother liked and my childhood nickname from a Grateful Dead song that my father liked. I retain my "random noises" theory of naming, even if it's illusory.
... and now, back to doing character development for my randomly-named characters.
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