The naming of characters is a difficult thing
I'm three four days into Camp NaNo and I'm actually on track to meet (or exceed) my goal of getting the first 30k of Zombie Circus written. Woot! It's already starting to feel real and flow nicely and it feels *good* writing it, which is something I've learned is a good sign from writing fanfic.
One of the fun things has been picking out names. I've heard a lot of authors discussing the importance of getting the names right, and it's never been something that I worried about before.
All of my previous unfinished original novels have been on the high fantasy side. (This may explain a lot about why they're unfinished *sigh*). When it comes to names for that kind of world, I've tended to just make up something that sounds good and go with that. Real world names are hard to do in that kind of setting because they don't feel real.
When I'm writing fanfic, most of the names are already chosen. I'll name the ocassional OC, but they're generally pretty minor so I just pick something out of the air and move on.
Zombie Circus is gaslamp fantasy - steampunk with a bit of magic. That makes it, more or less, alternative history. So I can use real world names, and suddenly picking the right ones feels really important. The right name can be a good short-cut to tell the reader a character's nationality and hint at their social class. That gives clues about appearance and accent and so on before any description is given. Until I began naming my characters for this story, I really hadn't noticed how many assumptions we make about a person based on a name.
(Although I should have, after I spent ages at a previous workplace looking for a Chinese woman called Soo Lin...only to find out that I'd actually been looking for an English woman called Sue Lynn. Oops.)
Anyway, point is, I'm finally starting to understand why authors choose character names so carefully. It's weirdly intimidating.
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One of the fun things has been picking out names. I've heard a lot of authors discussing the importance of getting the names right, and it's never been something that I worried about before.
All of my previous unfinished original novels have been on the high fantasy side. (This may explain a lot about why they're unfinished *sigh*). When it comes to names for that kind of world, I've tended to just make up something that sounds good and go with that. Real world names are hard to do in that kind of setting because they don't feel real.
When I'm writing fanfic, most of the names are already chosen. I'll name the ocassional OC, but they're generally pretty minor so I just pick something out of the air and move on.
Zombie Circus is gaslamp fantasy - steampunk with a bit of magic. That makes it, more or less, alternative history. So I can use real world names, and suddenly picking the right ones feels really important. The right name can be a good short-cut to tell the reader a character's nationality and hint at their social class. That gives clues about appearance and accent and so on before any description is given. Until I began naming my characters for this story, I really hadn't noticed how many assumptions we make about a person based on a name.
(Although I should have, after I spent ages at a previous workplace looking for a Chinese woman called Soo Lin...only to find out that I'd actually been looking for an English woman called Sue Lynn. Oops.)
Anyway, point is, I'm finally starting to understand why authors choose character names so carefully. It's weirdly intimidating.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenay.dreamwidth.org/505271.html. There are currently
babbles on the entry on Dreamwidth