Writing Meme - Day 3

[erastes]

3. How do you come up with names, for characters (and for places if you're writing about fictional places)?

Argh!  Names! Names are my anathema.  My nemesis.  I can be writing away happily, and I have to introduce a new character and give them a name and CRASH - I grind to a halt, gnashing my teeth.

As regular readers will know I like to get the details right. (Doesn't mean I manage this, but I do try my damnedest.) and that goes for names.  I'm not a huge fan of calling one's characters by anachronistic names or made up names in what is admittedly a romance tradition and no-one would blame me if I succumbed to it. (My peers would snigger behind their hands, however, which keeps me honest.)  In heterosexual romance the characters are often called by hugely silly names. The heroine is called Summer, or Winter. (There are probably books where she's called Autumn, Fall or Spring, too...) There are Barons called Devon and Kit. (I read a contemporary the other day with those names actually, and you are still just as unlikely to find English men with those names today as you would back in the Regency or Victorian times.  We don't change very easily...

Although there are still surprises to be had

As to how I come up with names?  I have a huge spreadsheet of Regency names which someone gave me a while back, which is gleaned from writings of the day, and although there are still some surprises with the names there - such as Christmas, Garden, Fox, Fulke - in the majority of cases they are perfectly ordinary names: George, Duncan, etc.  In fact, until fairly recently many churches would refuse to baptise children with outlandish names.  It is changing now, with names like Chardonnay and Nike slipping into the population (makes face). 

I use census records, birth deaths marriages - ship manifests all that kind of thing - and then... I go and plump for something as extraordinary as "Adam Heyward."  LOL.

Many of the names in Standish were deliberately chosen to mean something. Ambrose's first name was chosen because of the pun that Alvisi discovers later in the book.  Ambrose is an innocent, a spoof on the innocent seduced heroine, and "Ambrosia" is what Alvisi calls him to goad Rafe.

Rafe means "Wolf Counsellor" which reflects his devious mind and his wolfish slanting eyes.  Goshawk of course is a bird of prey.  Gordian, Rafe's father, means a unknottable knot, Mauvaise (one of the villains) speaks for itself, and so on.

David and Jonathan from Transgressions came pretty easily, because it seemed right that although they were opposites in so many ways, the fact that they were Biblical soul-mates (which would have pleased Jonathan secretly, and was a tool for David to help to seduce Jon) was rather touching.  Their surnames however were a pain in the proverbial. I used real names from the area - the Midlands of England in the early 17th century, Caverly and Graie both being real surnames. Plus Caverly is subtly like Cavalier, and Graie reflecting Jonathan's dress and outlook on life.

Sometimes you have to be careful, though. I thought I'd chosen perfect names for Tributary. and then i realised I had a character called Louis (and I stressed that he preferred it pronounced Lewis) and a character with the surname of ARMSTRONG. Oops.

I was going to say that I don't make up names of places but that's not strictly true, as I made up the name of Standish for the name of the family and the house in my first novel.  How did I come up with that?  Well, that's really where the whole thing started. I knew I wanted to write something as I had been struck by inspiration and had a nebulous idea about a vampire living in Venice so I was thumbing my way through my mothers Oxford Dictionary which is from 1960 and is about six inches thick with rice paper thin pages. It's the sort of dictionary you can't find today, with the kind of words that would have appeared on Call My Bluff.  I was writing down words I didn't know (you are bound to: supernal, post-prandial, and that kind of thing - anything seductive and erotic sounding and then I came across standish, a word I hadn't heard before.  I found that it meant an inkwell, the brass or silver kind that stands on a desk - literally a standing dish for pens and ink - and my mind hit the jackpot. What is that was the name of a house?  What if the family had the same name?  They don't live in the house... Why don't they live in the house.... And the rest, as they say, is history. What's amusing is that I found out that there is a place called Standish in England (In Lancashire, not Dorset, however) - and it's a traffic jam blackspot, gets a mention on the radio nearly every day!  Nice subliminal advertising!


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Comments

[chris-smith-atr.livejournal.com]

Avoid Standish, Queues back to the M6.

:P

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Avoid Standish. House full of raging Regency homos.

[chris-smith-atr.livejournal.com]

*buys binoculars, makes a bird-hide, peers out*

You were saying?

[crawling-angel.livejournal.com]

*books self a room with spyhole in wall*

[crawling-angel.livejournal.com]

Yes, me too! I can't write until I give someone the 'correct' name...a fitting one. I can't just call someone 'X' either and continue with the writing until I think of a name. Everything grinds to a halt until I 'find' the perfect name for them. I love the feeling in my little heart when it feels right. :)

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Exactly - sometimes I write on and realise that he's got the wrong name entirely. To be perfectly frank I'm still not completely convinced with Philip Smallwood in Mere Mortals!

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

What does Mauvaise mean? And how do you pronounce it? I mentally pronounce it as "maw-VAYZE," but it looks French so that's probably wrong.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's how you pronounce it, and it means "bad faith"

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

Oh! I had no clue it meant anything. It was just a rather unpleasant-looking name--reminded me of "malaise" for some reason.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

It's usually used in a prefix - mauvaise foi (bad faith) mauvaise graine (bad seed) so "bad" is probably more accurate. Someone criticised the book (Mrs G?) complaining that to call a villain "bad" was stupid. LOL.

[josephine-myles.livejournal.com]

I know a Devon, but he's only five. He has a sister called Parvati, god help her. The mum is neither Indian nor a hippy.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. Yes, that's exactly the problem...Poor kids.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Eddie Murphy had a comedy routine in which he critiqued the name choices of contempororary mothers. "They're watching German car ads, and they see this thing with umlauts and accents, and they yell out, 'Farvignugen! That's a great name! I'll call her 'Farvignugen!'"