The Name Game

What can you learn from a person's name?

There's a whole lot of information packed into those two or three (or more) words that mean YOU. Your first name was chosen by your parents, so it tells us something about them. It usually hints at their education level, where they're from, and their socio-economic status. Certain names can indicate political leanings and religious affiliations. The last name, something handed down to you through the generations, can tell us something about the nationality of your ancestors on at least one side of the family, and if you've hyphenated it with your mother's last name then we get a double-dose of information.

Your first name can also tell us your approximate age. Go to the Social Security Administration's baby names database to find out the most popular baby names in any given year. If you go to an elementary school classroom today, you're probably not going to find a student named Donald or Shirley (popular in the 1930's).

And this is only when we're talking about real people.

Your fictional character's name tells your reader a lot about the story. You, as the author, have chosen that name, so the reader uses it not only to judge you as an author, but to make predictions about the story you are going to tell. An attractive name can be just as an important draw for the reader as your book's title.

Character names should match the setting. Historical fiction is easy - just do your research. For fantasy, you have to ask yourself what branch of the genre are you working in. What mythologies are you drawing on? Go there to find good character names. But please, I don't want to see any more female heroines named Kira, Kia, Kaya or the like. Please.

Fantasy writers do have the option of entirely making up names. But no matter how you try, you can't make up a name that WON'T evoke something in your reader's mind. In fact, why would you want to attach a totally meaningless word to any of your characters anyway? Pack some extra information in your prose. Choose a name that tells me something about the person wearing it.

A few cautions when it comes to naming characters:

1. Avoid names that are difficult to pronounce, and names that could be pronounced multiple ways.
2. For a group of characters in a story, avoid using names that start with the same letter. Readers will get those characters mixed up.
3. In your prose, don't use multiple names for the same character. They may be called different names by different other characters in dialog, but you as the narrator need to pick one name and stick to it. An exception would be when a character's name actually changes in the course of the story, and you make the transition clear and stay consistent with the new name.

I've already mentioned the Social Security Administration website as a good place to go look for names. There are also several name databases on the internet, and even some fantasy character name generators.
Have fun, but remember! Character names are important. In fact, your main character's name may be the most common word in your entire manuscript. Choose it carefully.

When to be Original

No one likes to see the same old same old, especially when it comes to entertainment. We're all searching for something new and exciting. And when we create stories, we want them to be fresh and original.

But on the other hand, you don't want to be so way out there that no one can connect with your story.

This really smart professor guy named Joseph Campbell studied myths and legends all over the world and discovered that a lot of great stories have pretty much the same plot. He wrote about it in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (click to read the Wikipedia article). Modern storytellers, like George Lucas paid attention, and have made a lot of money creating their own versions of this basic myth. It works because it taps into universal human experience. It feels right.

We'll talk about what exactly this most epic plot is in another lesson.

So if George Lucas used the same storytelling elements that have been used since cavemen swapped tales over the campfire, how come Star Wars seemed like something we'd never seen before?

It was all in the setting. And the light sabers. Yeah, those are cool.

The constant pattern of human life, of all life in fact, is that we are all born, we grow, we live, and then we die. The same story over and over. What makes each life unique is the time and place in which we are born, the people we associate with, the minor details of our life events.

So one way to make your story seem different from every other story, even if you choose to tell a story that's been told a million times, is to have that story play out in a new setting. A setting you invent, or one you research, or one you've lived in yourself.

It's not good to mess with basic plot structure, especially for the beginning writer. Learn as much as you can about the kinds of stories that work and master those forms before you try and get inventive. But you can always, always put your stories in settings that are fresh and original.

Most writers start out imitating their favorite kinds of stories, and then eventually move into their own. Don't worry too much about being original. There's no one else like you in the whole world, and if you write what's truly inside you, your story will be something wonderful that no one has ever seen before.