More on naming fictional characters...

Check out this blog post (link below) for more interesting information and considerations about naming our characters.

One snippet of advice is to avoid using a character name that ends with "s." The reason? It gets awkward to make the name possessive!

For example, Doris. Is it Doris' coat or Doris's coat? Either one seems funky. Who wants to struggle with this through an entire novel?


http://www.gointothestory.com/2010/09/importance-of-character-names.html

interview your character!

From Lauren Grodstein, “The Interview” in Now Write! Editor Sherry Ellis, Penguin, 2006.

Journal exercise:

This assignment involves creating a character and getting to know that character as well as you can. Your job is to interview your character as though you were a journalist for, say, Esquire or The New Yorker, and your character were the subject of a big juicy profile piece. Here are some of the questions you might want to ask your character;

--What is your earliest childhood memory?

--What’s your idea of a dream vacation?

--If you could have any other job, what would it be?

--Whom do you consider a hero?

--Which do you prefer: rock, opera, or jazz—and why?

--Or do you only listen to talk radio? Or do you listen to nothing at all?

Ask your interviewee anything you want!

It’s not that you will use all of this information in your fictional piece, but interviewing your character gives that character depth enough “to convince your reader of the genuineness of your fictional world. A thin character is not strong enough to hold up the narrative dream your stories should create.”

Quote of the day! from Stephen King

"Book-buyers aren't attracted, by and large, by the literary merits of a novel; book buyers want a good story to take with them on the airplane, something that will first fascinate them, then pull them in and keep them turning the pages. This happens, I think, when readers recognize the people in a book, their behaviors, their surroundings, and their talk. When the reader hears strong echoes of his or her own life and beliefs, he or she is apt to become more invested in the story. I'd argue that it's impossible to make this sort of connection in a pre-meditated way, gauging the market like a racetrack tout with a hot tip."
From On Writing.

quote of the day from Why I Write by Joan Didion

When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges. There used to be an illustration in every elementary psychology book showing a cat drawn by a patient in varying stages of schizophrenia. This cat had a shimmer around it. You could see the molecular structure breaking down at the very edges of the cat: the cat became the background and the background the cat, everything interacting, exchanging ions. People on hallucinogens describe the same perception of objects. I’m not a schizophrenic, nor do I take hallucinogens, but certain images do shimmer for me. Look hard enough, and you can’t miss the shimmer. It’s there. You can’t think too much about these pictures that shimmer. You just lie low and let them develop. You stay quiet. You don’t talk to many people and you keep your nervous system from shorting out and you try to locate the cat in the shimmer, the grammar in the picture.

Quote of the day

"In the end, writing is like a prison, an island from which you will never be released but which is a kind of paradise: the solitude, the thoughts, the incredible joy of putting into words the essence of what you for the moment understand and with your whole heart want to believe."
James Salter