First I want to say "thank you Grinders", for showing your support and helping this blog hit an early milestone of being comfortably into the four figures of total views. It is humbling to have so many people taking time out of their busy day and read what I have to say. I really hope it is helping get you thinking about writing, helping you prepare for NaNo, but most of all I hope it keeps you focused on your writing goals. Your support and comments help me stay focused on mine. Thank you.
Today I am going to make this short, but powerful in how much this tip will help you. This tip is especially helpful for those of you who are wanting to write faster, especially you NaNoWriMo hopefuls. The best part is, this tip can help anyone writing in any form of fiction. Have I built this up enough yet? Good.
I call it building a name list. Yes it is just that simple, but I don't know of many people who do it. I thought it was so simple, so silly, that I didn't do it forever and I kept on banging my head against the same road block. I realized that over the course of a novel or long writing project it would cost me minutes that over the course of 60 or 70 thousand words probably cost me hours. It happens to us all when we stop to name a character.
We all do it, though we do it different ways. I am half OCD and half touchy-feely so when I name a character I want it to sound equal parts: cool, classy, significant, have a deeper meaning, and be something unique. For example, if I see the name Gideon one more time I might freak. It is one thing to name your character John, sure I know a lot of Johns, but I have never met one Gideon in the whole of my life, but I can think of a dozen books the name appears in. When I got to the point of naming a character, even a trivial character, and especially so when I named a main character. I would stop my writing dead cold in the scene and grab my stack of name books, break out Google, and search the dark corners of my mind for just the perfect name.
I hated the whole process. I hated the time it took. And most of all I can think of so many times I would stop the project for the day because the prefect name didn't materialize, which cost me countless hours of writing productivity. I knew I had to stop this black hole of wasting my writing time. And eventually I came up with the easiest solution. Instead of coming up with the character names during the writing of a scene, which for the longest time seemed ultimately logical, I decided to build a character list of first and last names, for both genders, and put them on a piece of paper BEFORE I began the project. And when I came to a scene where I needed to insert a name I would look to my list and find a good combo that seemed to fit and then I just inserted it and made a note on the paper to avoid using it again.
I quickly found that I could breeze through a scene and feel like I could build on that character without all of the baggage that researching a name had caused before. Over time I refined this technique, such as when I write sci-fi I find a list of character names that sound like they belong to another world. And if I am writing a thriller set in recent times I will tailor a different list. I can tell at a glance what kind of themes or patterns I have with my name choices. I can then avoid having too many characters who have the same letter starting their name, or have too many last names that have a similar cadence. This make it far easier for your reader to not get confused as you introduce new characters to your story.
One last thing, you don't have to waste your time getting a naming book or using a baby name website. For example the most recent book I wrote, which was a sci-fi story set 200 years in the future, I knew I needed a list of about 30 characters and I got about 26 of those first and last names from the current rosters of baseball and football teams. To be clear I didn't copy and paste their names, I would simply mix and match names and I came up with names like Miles Axford, Lana Drake, Layne Rayburn, Roland Sale. In fact the only character I didn't get either name from a roster was the main character Tabris Valen.
The challenge this time is to find a set of rosters for a favorite sport, or the names from the credit list at the end of a movie, or the first 20 names you find when you read a newspaper, copy them down, cut and paste the names and create a list of a dozen or so potential characters. Please don't forget to share some of your favorite discoveries in the comments.
I hope this tip helps you avoid the speed bumps that plagued my early writing. This tip can be the difference maker for those of your gearing up for NaNo in a couple of weeks.
Good luck, now get back to the grind.
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