Names

In The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, two characters who get married have names meaning Prince and Princess; here, obviously, their names indicate their relationship to each other. In The Fault In Our Stars by John Green, Augustus - the name of a Roman emperor - is referred to by his full name when he is strong and confident, and when he is weak and pitiful he is simply called Gus, which sounds more like the nickname of a child.

Character names needn't be as meaningful as this; any name has connotations. A name like Felicity implies that the character is quite feminine, whereas Taylor as a girls' name suggests the opposite. A plain name such as John might be given to an equally plain character.

A story I'm currently writing is about faeries (the ones with courts and queens - not the ones that like flowers and live at the bottom of your garden), so I've been using a lot of Irish names for characters. One character, a hobgoblin, is named Beagan, meaning small one, because hobgoblins are typically represented as small faeries; Eliana, whose name means sun, rules the Summer Court; a selkie - a type of water faerie - is named Muirin, meaning born of the sea. For most of my characters, I searched for a name that would suit them, but in some cases it was a name with an interesting meaning that inspired me to create a corresponding character.

So it's always a good idea to look up the meaning of a name before you use it for a character. Baby name websites are good for this, and for getting ideas for names in the first place. I spend more time on baby name websites than can be healthy.

Setting Out

Block one of my Open University course - Start Writing Fiction - gives a few tips on what to do before you start writing.

• Make sure you know enough about the characters, setting, and plot. I've mentioned this is my post about planning; the first time I tried to write a novel, I failed miserably because I hadn't planned enough. I advise having an idea of what happens in every single chapter before you even think about writing. Of course, some people work just as well beginning with no plan at all, but if you're new to this (I'm hardly an expert) then I'd recommend some serious planning.
• If the story stems from one image, unpack it slowly. Sometimes ideas come from nowhere almost fully formed, but I often imagine a single image or scene, which is my starting point. With Courage to Live, the image of a teenage girl and a girl of about five meeting in a hospital was what I based everything on when, in the end, I didn't use that scene. The main thing was to figure out who these characters were, why they were linked, and how they ended up in the hospital.
• Know how long the story will be. You don't have to decide that your story will be 80,000 words before you start, of course. It is, however, a good idea to know whether you want to write a short story, a novella, a novel, a trilogy, etc. I usually define a short story as less than 7,500 words, a novella as 7,500-50,000 words, and a novel as over 50,000. I've been told that a debut novel should not exceed 100,000 words, but it does depend on the genre. 

The course asks you to think about where you write best (a room in your house, the library, a cafe?)  and when (in the morning, during a free twenty minutes, or at night?). A small section of the first block focuses on the importance of names, which I'll write another blog post about.

I'm back!

When I left you in November, it was because I was busy completely NaNoWriMo. In the first three days of November, I easily wrote 2500 words a day, and so I decided to continue with this target throughout the month. I managed it, leaving me with 75,000 words of a novel, but it was exhausting and time consuming and I just didn't have the time or motivation to blog.

After that, I had my January exams to revise for.

And somewhere along the way I forgot about this blog. For that, I apologise; I spent about an hour finding it again, though, and now I'm back.

This year so far, I've done the vast majority of a twelve week creative writing course for the Open University. I'll write another post summarising each of the five blocks and I might post my first assessment piece. The second (and final) assessment is due in for the 27th, and at the moment it's a work in progress.

Yesterday, I finished the first draft of my NaNoWriMo novel, which is temporarily named Courage To Live. It ended up being just over 90,000 words so, seeing as I wrote 9000 words beforehand, it's taken me four and a half months to write about 6000 words. Hmm. The wonderful thing is that, once my next lot of exams are over, I can finally edit this novel into something worth reading. I'm proud of myself for completing just the draft, because it means I cared enough to finish it, albeit slowly, which I didn't do with my novel of 2010 (because it was a pile of horse crap).

Expect a few posts about my Open University course, updates on my editing of Courage To Live, some random facts about grammar and language, and then in August possible silence as I once again attempt to complete NaNoWriMo - but in the summer!

Lex :)