Getting to know a new
character is like being on an archaeological dig: carefully dusting off a
buried treasure and seeing it slowly reveal itself. Characters, to me, aren’t
really created so much as discovered…to
such an extent that if I get their names wrong, they definitely let me know
about it.
Alex has always been
Alex, if you’re wondering – his name came to me instantly. So did Seb’s. Willow’s
took a while to get right. I spent several weeks desperately trawling through
‘name your baby’ websites, because the thing is, until you have a character’s
name, you can’t write. Or at least I
can’t. Then driving my car one day, a thought came from nowhere: ‘I wonder if
she’s named after a tree..?’ (The writing-gods obviously felt sorry for me and decided to give me
a hint.)
Weirdly, if you
change a character’s name, the character changes. Remember Kara? She was
originally named Mia, and was different in lots of minor ways. When I changed
her name, she shifted. (If anyone’s curious, Kara was named after Kara Thrace of
the new Battlestar Galactica series –
I saw her as a mix of that character and Zoe from Firefly.) (Yes, I know: Geek Alert.) (Which also means – tangent –
that her name is pronounced to rhyme with Farrah.)
Now that I’m
writing something new, the naming process has again reared its
sometimes-agonising head. I thought I
had my new main character’s name right: Danni. But for the first 20k words or
so, I had no idea what she looked like. None. I kept writing descriptions and
then taking them out again, because they didn’t feel right, and who was this girl anyway, and ARGH.
Then I got an email
from my lovely mate Julie Cohen, who reported that she’d just changed her main
character’s name and suddenly her whole book was singing. Huh, I thought. I
want my book to sing. I wonder if…
So I went back to the
drawing board – and when I delved a bit more into the story’s world and my
character’s backstory, I saw that her name just didn’t fit. I started thinking
thematically, looking at synonyms for words that are crucial to the main story
concept. The moment I saw ‘Amity’, I got chills. (Chills are good.) More
importantly (but also kind of spooky), suddenly I could SEE her – looking
nothing like I’d thought, yet utterly vivid in my mind’s eye. Now the problem
is almost that she’s come to life too much.
She very much has a mind of her own.
So…yeah. Names. You
gotta get them right.
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