Yesterday I attended another in the line of my friend Jason’s literary salons. While the topic (critique groups) held some importance to review for me as a leader/facilitator of such a group, it was something I learned before the event started that really jumped out at me, and while so simple, and rather obvious, it marked somewhat of a paradigm shift in my thinking.
What was this blessed piece of information that has altered my writing state so? It’s about character naming, something I’ve been passionate about in the past with friends (and possibly in this blog, though I didn’t intend to reference past posts, so I’m not certain I’ve shared this with the “wider” public of my few readers before). I’ve certainly railed against naming a character after something that happens in their future, that the parents would have no way of knowing about, so it makes absolutely no sense. (Would royalty know their offspring would eventually assume the throne? Yes. Would they know that their child will be turned into a vampire at some point? Most likely not.)
It’s funny how I was so close to what came up last night, and yet how far away I was. I considered the parents naming the child, but not that the parents are the ones naming the child. What I mean is, when it comes to naming a character, what would the parents of that character name her/him when they were born? It would be easy to pick a name that the character in question might wish for themself, but would that really make sense? Oftentimes, no.
I’m not entirely certain I’ve taken the position of thinking about character names in this way, from how their parents would name the kid. If I’m honest, sometimes names just come to me to use for characters, but more often then not, I’ve relied on some outside source, like combing the names of my Facebook friends, or looking up baby names, or, should I wish an appellation with a specific meaning, I pick based on that. But what the parents might name them? Not so much.
Am I wrong? Isn’t this so simple? After all, unless we change our names once we get older, or are lucky enough to choose how people address us (such as a nickname, which I did get to choose by accident with a swath of my friends, though many don’t refer to me as such anymore), we’re stuck with what our parent(s) gave us.
This method of choosing character names was relayed by one friend from another, and it sounds like it was shared some time ago, and I missed out. Not that I hold that everything should be shared with me with regard to writing, but there’s a part of me that feels sad that I didn’t “learn” this earlier. It’s not as if I’ve written a whole lot in that time (as, despite my advice last post that there’s no substitute for actually sitting down and writing, I’ve done very little, other than some freewriting that inspired me to get back in the habit, and then I promptly didn’t keep that up).
At any rate, there are always going to be new ways to think about the same old things when it comes to figuring out elements of a story. Sometimes they serve as reminders of things you learned a long time ago. Sometimes they’re little nuggets of literary joy that somehow slipped through your experience, only to emerge as a precious jewel when discovered. That’s part of the beauty not only of life in general, but in the writing journey specifically.