My characters don't name themselves. When I give a character a name, it's the result of a lot of work on my part. What's weird, though, is that after the first main character is named, most of the other names come pretty readily. (But that first one is a killer.)
For example. In the novel I'm working on now, the Heretic King, I had two main characters. It's offworld fantasy, and one of the main characters is from fantasy-Egypt/Greece and the other MC is from fantasy-India. I had a bunch of scenes in my head that I was just bursting to write, but I've never been able to start a novel without named characters. So I spent a day (literally, 8+ hours) trying to think up names for these characters. I must have read half of behindthename.com. Then I had to go to a baby shower. I spent the car ride there and back (and the whole party, except, of course, while we were having cake) thinking of names. At twelve that night, I finally came up with some names and started writing. (The girl's name is Sabrai and the guy's name is Ptolemael, in case you were interested.)
I've never really given a character a name that had a meaning, like Miri does--I go more for form than function, I guess--but I really like most of my character names all the same. So the moral of this story is: when it comes to names (and most other things), do what works for you.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Saturday, January 16, 2010
On Names, or, Characters Do Name Themselves, I'm Not Crazy, I Swear
Anyone who knows me and has been on speaking terms with me since mid-October or so has heard me chatter (nigh incessantly at times) about my fifth National Novel Writing Month Novel, Clockwork Wings. And anyone who's spoken to me further knows that I attribute a lot of rather active traits to my characters - that I discuss them more in terms of living "people" than most people really get.
This year's effort stood out in a number of ways. From a practical standpoint, it's the second NaNo I've finished within November (the fourth NaNo I've finished overall) and the first I've finished within November with a book-length wordcount (my first year didn't precisely limp to its conclusion at 52k, but there wasn't a great deal of urgency in its pace). This year presented me with my greatest extra-NaNo workload - all the high school juniors in the audience can sympathize here - and somehow it was my best showing to date. (And I confess I'm worried about my next attempt, considering that several fellow Mooselings suffered something of a sixth-year NaNo slump. But I think my stubbornness is equal to the challenge.)
Maybe I'm finally learning to finish what I start. Maybe it's true that if you want something done, you should ask a busy person to do it - to quote Chris Baty, founder of NaNoWriMo, if you've already got a million things to do, adding number one-million-and-one is no big deal.
But I'd be remiss in not crediting this year's monumental sucess at least in part to my cast of characters - an astounding group of people that I'd known (if you'll forgive the conceit) anywhere from two weeks to four years before I started writing their story.
My focus on the characters was an interesting reversal: while many writers I've spoken with (though by no means all) identify themselves as either a plot writer or a character writer, I've always been an avowed setting writer. A compulsive worldbuilder. I started drawing maps shortly after reading The Chronicles of Narnia in the second grade - my middle school notebooks are riddled with them. I love flags, I love cultures, I especially love languages (as anyone who's seen my class schedule can attest) and there's no greater intellectual joy than creating a world that is complete unto itself, with its conceits and dysfunctions providing and enhancing any conflict, any story I could place there.
This time, now that I'm thinking about it, I guess the setting did come first, or a very (dimensions-wise) small part of it: the Gray Tower, the site of the execution of traitors, my analog to London's Tower Green. (I can admit this.) For most of 2006, I planned to write my second NaNo about a young captain of the royal guard who would be forced to execute her two best lieutenants and best friends. (I was a morbid twelve-year-old. Sue me.)
The captain's name, from the first time I pictured her, was Marsa. I didn't look into it, didn't run searches on word elements like I do now that I've discovered BehindTheName.com. I just knew that it was her name, that it fit.
Marsa. My duty-bound militant guard captain.
Mars. Roman god of war.
I put this together in December (2009) and it blew my mind. I'd read mythology before, so I'm sure I was very, very subconsciously thinking it when creating this character, but it still surprised me, this accidentally perfect name.
That's not the only example. My main character this year popped up in a scenelet I wrote on the bus last May, and that morning in first period I asked for a female name at random. A good friend said, equally at random, "Claire." I decided I liked it, stuck it on, and didn't think much more about it until October came and I was putting together a plan for my story. Claire's clarity - her clear vision of problems and solutions, her brightness of outlook - were her defining characteristics. Another perfect name, without any input from me.
Now, several of my names were researched and planned. The deciding factor in naming the bodyguard Alexei was that one of its meanings was "protector"; my wing-technician Ciel was very intentionally named for the sky. Claire's parents were named, in a roundabout way, for the gods of tricks and fire in a couple of different mythologies, and that says a lot about their personalities. I liked names that say something about the character - I think it's my right as a writer to have as much fun as I possibly can with them.
And I do. Names are fun. Great fun.
But they're even more fun when they present themselves to me whole-cloth, hiding their true importance until I stumble across it.
Names. Reason number #23 I love writing.
This year's effort stood out in a number of ways. From a practical standpoint, it's the second NaNo I've finished within November (the fourth NaNo I've finished overall) and the first I've finished within November with a book-length wordcount (my first year didn't precisely limp to its conclusion at 52k, but there wasn't a great deal of urgency in its pace). This year presented me with my greatest extra-NaNo workload - all the high school juniors in the audience can sympathize here - and somehow it was my best showing to date. (And I confess I'm worried about my next attempt, considering that several fellow Mooselings suffered something of a sixth-year NaNo slump. But I think my stubbornness is equal to the challenge.)
Maybe I'm finally learning to finish what I start. Maybe it's true that if you want something done, you should ask a busy person to do it - to quote Chris Baty, founder of NaNoWriMo, if you've already got a million things to do, adding number one-million-and-one is no big deal.
But I'd be remiss in not crediting this year's monumental sucess at least in part to my cast of characters - an astounding group of people that I'd known (if you'll forgive the conceit) anywhere from two weeks to four years before I started writing their story.
My focus on the characters was an interesting reversal: while many writers I've spoken with (though by no means all) identify themselves as either a plot writer or a character writer, I've always been an avowed setting writer. A compulsive worldbuilder. I started drawing maps shortly after reading The Chronicles of Narnia in the second grade - my middle school notebooks are riddled with them. I love flags, I love cultures, I especially love languages (as anyone who's seen my class schedule can attest) and there's no greater intellectual joy than creating a world that is complete unto itself, with its conceits and dysfunctions providing and enhancing any conflict, any story I could place there.
This time, now that I'm thinking about it, I guess the setting did come first, or a very (dimensions-wise) small part of it: the Gray Tower, the site of the execution of traitors, my analog to London's Tower Green. (I can admit this.) For most of 2006, I planned to write my second NaNo about a young captain of the royal guard who would be forced to execute her two best lieutenants and best friends. (I was a morbid twelve-year-old. Sue me.)
The captain's name, from the first time I pictured her, was Marsa. I didn't look into it, didn't run searches on word elements like I do now that I've discovered BehindTheName.com. I just knew that it was her name, that it fit.
Marsa. My duty-bound militant guard captain.
Mars. Roman god of war.
I put this together in December (2009) and it blew my mind. I'd read mythology before, so I'm sure I was very, very subconsciously thinking it when creating this character, but it still surprised me, this accidentally perfect name.
That's not the only example. My main character this year popped up in a scenelet I wrote on the bus last May, and that morning in first period I asked for a female name at random. A good friend said, equally at random, "Claire." I decided I liked it, stuck it on, and didn't think much more about it until October came and I was putting together a plan for my story. Claire's clarity - her clear vision of problems and solutions, her brightness of outlook - were her defining characteristics. Another perfect name, without any input from me.
Now, several of my names were researched and planned. The deciding factor in naming the bodyguard Alexei was that one of its meanings was "protector"; my wing-technician Ciel was very intentionally named for the sky. Claire's parents were named, in a roundabout way, for the gods of tricks and fire in a couple of different mythologies, and that says a lot about their personalities. I liked names that say something about the character - I think it's my right as a writer to have as much fun as I possibly can with them.
And I do. Names are fun. Great fun.
But they're even more fun when they present themselves to me whole-cloth, hiding their true importance until I stumble across it.
Names. Reason number #23 I love writing.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
And We're Off!
I'm finished with The Heretic King, nine pages into my NaNo novel, have really no plot at all, and I'm loving every second of it. Forget about Christmas. November is the most wonderful time of the year.
4052 words,
Ink
4052 words,
Ink
Thursday, October 22, 2009
A Motivation to Tell a Story
I'm angry. I'm extremely angry.
I'm a storyteller. I may not be the best nuts-and-bolts writer, and I'm certainly not the best at weaving my tales together and making everything make sense, but I am a storyteller and I take pride in that. Stories are important to me; I cry over the touching moments in anime, books, movies, anything. Storytelling is sacred to me.
So the abuse of it incites a righteous anger in me. WHY would a show - a show that was shaping up to be at least my second-favorite of all time - waste so many perfectly good elements? The kid who was obviously the reincarnation of the big bad of a hundred years ago shows up ONCE and disappears with no more mention made, no show down, nothing more than hints? A thirteen-year-old girl binds her soul to a demon from the Abyss, a deal that happens only when someone desperately wants to change the past, and we're never given the reason or even have it really alluded to? A nine-year-old boy - the brother of arguably the best character in the series, nonetheless! - is seen at the sight of a heinous tragedy, surrounded by corpses and flames and covered in blood, laughing at the sight of it all, and we are given nothing but the fairly obvious hints that he was in fact the killer of a main character, that he's using everyone in the story, that he retains his memories from that tragedy when NO ONE ELSE DOES, and the last time we see him in the show, all he says is that he wishes he could tell his brother, but he doesn't remember? No showdown with any of the setup villains, no closure for any of our beloved characters, and - this is probably the most heinous failure of the story, though if any of the major villains had popped back up I could have forgiven it - a clock imprinted on the main character in the THIRD EPISODE with the explicit statement that when it makes a full rotation, he'll be dragged into the Abyss (which is exactly as bad as it sounds - and we saw it happen to another character very early on, in gruesome and tearjerking fashion) - this clock, over the course of the series, ONLY MAKES IT TO THE SECOND MARKING OF TWELVE?!?
So, yeah, I can't remember the last time I was this angry. Tears were shed, parents were sufficiently exasperated; such is the life of a sentimental idiot.
I think it came on a bad day, too; I've had to deal with something of a disappointment from several people I've known for quite awhile, and I admit, when I sat down to finish this series, I wanted an escape. A story where the consequences of one's actions are destined to come about. An ideal. That's possible in stories.
And instead, I get one of the bigger letdowns of my lifetime of engaging in stories. It's not fair. It's really not.
But I knew this was a possibility. Another series I watched recently crashed and burned, but I wasn't nearly as attached to that one. I knew this might happen, much as I had hope for it not to, and I knew one of two things would happen:
One, I would be so depressed that my motivation to do anything would be sapped. I don't recall if this has happened, but I've been out of sorts lately and this show caught my fascination in a way that very few have.
Two, I would be angry, fired up, motivated to write a better story, to give my story a true ending, and to do it inside the confines of a month, just to show how much better I am than them.
Thankfully, it's the latter.
I cannot WAIT for NaNo to start.
I'm a storyteller. I may not be the best nuts-and-bolts writer, and I'm certainly not the best at weaving my tales together and making everything make sense, but I am a storyteller and I take pride in that. Stories are important to me; I cry over the touching moments in anime, books, movies, anything. Storytelling is sacred to me.
So the abuse of it incites a righteous anger in me. WHY would a show - a show that was shaping up to be at least my second-favorite of all time - waste so many perfectly good elements? The kid who was obviously the reincarnation of the big bad of a hundred years ago shows up ONCE and disappears with no more mention made, no show down, nothing more than hints? A thirteen-year-old girl binds her soul to a demon from the Abyss, a deal that happens only when someone desperately wants to change the past, and we're never given the reason or even have it really alluded to? A nine-year-old boy - the brother of arguably the best character in the series, nonetheless! - is seen at the sight of a heinous tragedy, surrounded by corpses and flames and covered in blood, laughing at the sight of it all, and we are given nothing but the fairly obvious hints that he was in fact the killer of a main character, that he's using everyone in the story, that he retains his memories from that tragedy when NO ONE ELSE DOES, and the last time we see him in the show, all he says is that he wishes he could tell his brother, but he doesn't remember? No showdown with any of the setup villains, no closure for any of our beloved characters, and - this is probably the most heinous failure of the story, though if any of the major villains had popped back up I could have forgiven it - a clock imprinted on the main character in the THIRD EPISODE with the explicit statement that when it makes a full rotation, he'll be dragged into the Abyss (which is exactly as bad as it sounds - and we saw it happen to another character very early on, in gruesome and tearjerking fashion) - this clock, over the course of the series, ONLY MAKES IT TO THE SECOND MARKING OF TWELVE?!?
So, yeah, I can't remember the last time I was this angry. Tears were shed, parents were sufficiently exasperated; such is the life of a sentimental idiot.
I think it came on a bad day, too; I've had to deal with something of a disappointment from several people I've known for quite awhile, and I admit, when I sat down to finish this series, I wanted an escape. A story where the consequences of one's actions are destined to come about. An ideal. That's possible in stories.
And instead, I get one of the bigger letdowns of my lifetime of engaging in stories. It's not fair. It's really not.
But I knew this was a possibility. Another series I watched recently crashed and burned, but I wasn't nearly as attached to that one. I knew this might happen, much as I had hope for it not to, and I knew one of two things would happen:
One, I would be so depressed that my motivation to do anything would be sapped. I don't recall if this has happened, but I've been out of sorts lately and this show caught my fascination in a way that very few have.
Two, I would be angry, fired up, motivated to write a better story, to give my story a true ending, and to do it inside the confines of a month, just to show how much better I am than them.
Thankfully, it's the latter.
I cannot WAIT for NaNo to start.
Friday, October 02, 2009
Public Service Announcement!
The NaNoWriMo site is up and running! It's awesome and has a ton of new features. Yay!
Check it out:
http://www.nanowrimo.org/
Check it out:
http://www.nanowrimo.org/
Thursday, October 01, 2009
Thought #8
Yesterday, I realized the only rapper I like at all is Agape, and I love 'Hiphopapotamus Versus Rhymenocerous' by the Flight of the Conchords, and I can kind of stand Eminem. So, apparently, I only like white rappers. The three white rappers in existence. What is wrong with me?
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Interjection #2, or, I Love Animation
And I always will. So the movie 9 really made me hopeful for being able to continue to watch intelligent animated movies well into adulthood. In any of my discussions about the movie, I mentioned that I was thrilled to see the movie industry breaking out of the Animation Age Ghetto.
Then I read the Trope page, which states that the Animation Age Ghetto was "Not just subverted, but punched in the face, shot up with a machine gun, thrown off a cliff, fed to sharks, and blown up. Also gassed."
Yeah, I giggled for about five minutes straight.
Then I read the Trope page, which states that the Animation Age Ghetto was "Not just subverted, but punched in the face, shot up with a machine gun, thrown off a cliff, fed to sharks, and blown up. Also gassed."
Yeah, I giggled for about five minutes straight.
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