One of the hardest things about writing, to me, is naming my characters. The first three books I wrote were "romance" novels. The heroine of the first one was named Liz, a big part-Hispanic girl based on someone I knew. The second was Sandra Scott, nicknamed Scotty. The third girl was so obnoxious, I can't even remember her name.
The fourth book was that NaNoWriMo November novel in 2007; it started out on The Mountain, and my aunt Betty Lou was the main person. I never got around to thinking up a different name to call her. Young Douglas was the best character in that book, and he didn't have a book name, either. This is the one I need to rewrite and try to market, but it'll have to have about another 50,000 words to explain World War Two and the ending, which I just sort of sketched in. Great-Grandma Missouri Ella was great in this book, too; her bonnet strings kept getting in her plate. She made a quilt for everybody she liked, and her kin made her dresses and bonnets out of the prettiest feed sacks.
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Sunday, April 11, 2010
What's In a Name? ("A possum by any other name...")
The one I'm writing now, I'll talk about so far as to tell the twins' names (unless I change them), Jane and Tracey. And a little demon named Peyton.
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4 comments:
I love that picture of Mr. Lowrey. For some reason when I was little, I thought he looked like Jiminy Cricket.
And that picture of you! Being a cute booger! Who are your two keeper? On the left must be Betty Lou; the one on the right looks too pretty to be one of us. Is it Bobbie?
Good luck with the writing and the naming. It's an awesome task. I found that reading weird confusing books helps, because I think "If they can write like that, I can write any way I want to!"
Trois
Betty Lou on the left, Bobbie on the right. Bobbie was a very pretty girl.
I needed a name for a detective, and settled on Joe Hall. There's a hockey player from the 1910s named "Bad Joe" Hall. So when someone who barely knows my detective calls him "Bad Joe," he's tipped off that the person has been Googling him.
When I used to write a little fiction now and then, I used to love making up the names. But I can't remember any of them right now.
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