Zestful Blog Post #237
No day in history has provided humans easier or more
plentiful ways to waste time than the one we’re living now. I don’t have to
begin to enumerate. Writers, I believe, are more vulnerable to time-wasting
opportunities than other tribes, because OMG, blank pages. Therefore, anything
we can do to save time and make life more efficient, we should do. And an easy
way for a fiction writer to save time, have fun, and even procrastinate guilt-free (!), is investing an early chunk of time on
character naming.
When you’ve got a fairly solid idea for a story or novel
going, and you’re starting to flesh things out—either with an outline or just a
bunch of pages of stormwriting—that’s the time to create a list of ready
character names. Because it’s no good to keep writing ‘Cop A’ or ‘Politician B’
or even ‘Ingenue’ or ‘Hero.’ For one thing, it’s boring, and for another, there’s
no personality to it. It’s like eating a handful of flour along with a raw egg
and a little sugar, instead of cooking up a nice little pancake. Sure, you
might create a name for a character only to later think of a better one. But at
least start with some semblance of a usable name.
[This is what I think a Norwegian Elkhound probably looks
like, or should.]
A name with a little possibility to it helps you visualize
the character as you write. That’s valuable, because it helps you bring that
character to life with more verve and efficiency. And for the same reasons it’s
so easy to waste time these days, it’s never been easier to quickly come up
with appropriate character names. You can search on popular Latino boys’ names,
traditional Irish surnames, popular Norwegian Elkhound names (yes), American female
names of the 1920s. Of course, if you want a character who is 25 years old in
the 1920s, search names given to babies in the 1900s. You can get a surprising
lot from just fifteen minutes’ worth of research. Which will stretch easily to half
an hour. Come up with twice as many names as you think you’ll need, because
minor characters. It’s a good investment.
The benefit is, when you start to write about a fictional
person, you’ve got a list to glance at, choose something from, and keep going.
No more discomfort with a generic non-name, and no more interrupting your flow
to hurriedly think of a name to plug in, over and over. Then when your story is
more firmed up, you can dig deeper and toy around with character names. And
needless to say, any names you don’t use this time around might prove worthwhile
the next.
Do you have any favorite strategies on character naming? To
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