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22 pages

English

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One of the ongoing chores for a writer is naming: naming people, places, or things. This book is designed to help every writer find, or make up, the names to make a fiction fly.

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Publié par	Book View Cafe
Date de parution	17 mai 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781636320687
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0160€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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By Any Other Name
Essays on Naming for Writers
Brenda W. Clough

copyright © 2022 Brenda Clough
Book View Café Edition July 5, 2022

www.bookviewcafe.com/
ISBN: 978-1-63632-048-9
Table of Contents
By Any Other Name
Introduction
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Also by Brenda W. Clough
Read a Sample of Revise the World
Copyrights & Credits
About Book View Café
Introduction
If you write science fiction or fantasy, you are constantlywrestling with the issue of names. Everything needs a name, and most of thetime you can’t just borrow the ones in your daily life. People who wield elvenswords are not usually named Larry or Mark. They very often live in places thatneed to sound more exotic than Boca Raton or Seattle.
I’ve written a number of short essays addressing thisproblem. These appeared over the years as blog posts on Book View Café, and foryears I’ve been handing out the links to writers who ask for help in namingpeople, places or things in their works. This compilation should make lifeeasier for all of us, because now they’re all here, in one place and one book.They have been somewhat edited and improved here and there.
Part 1
Tell Me Your Name
You write a novel. Naturally it has characters. And thosecharacters need names! Let us set aside for some other day the issue ofcreating fantasy names, and consider today only naming characters withcognomens that already exist.
Depending upon how you roll, this may come very early in thewriting process. In his Elements of Fiction Writing: Characters & Viewpoint ,Orson Scott Card mentions a friend who gives his characters dummy names: XXX,or YYY. Only when he’s nearly finished writing does he decide on names andreplace the XXX with Charles or Diego or whatever. Card adds that he himselfcouldn’t write that way.
It wouldn’t work for me either. For me the name comes beforebeginning the writing at all; if I don’t know the character’s name I can’t getany traction. I can get away without looking at my hero for manythousands of words. I was more than halfway through the first draft of HowLike A God before I thought to actually cast the authorial gaze upon myhero; I knew what all the other characters looked like because I was using hisviewpoint, but he had never done the old look-in-a-mirror stunt. (When I didlook I was astonished, and marked the place in the text. I do like a handsomehero.) To find a true name is a powerful magic, wielded by wizards in fantasynovels. And it’s one of the core competencies of the writer.
But there are a number of factors to consider. The mostimportant of course is time and place. A work that takes place on Mars in AD2502 is going to have a differently-named cast than a work that is set in 1741in Wales. Given names, especially, come and go in fashion in an easily-chartedway. You can search on it and kick up sites that will graph for you thepopularity of, say, John as a name for boys over the centuries. Certain namesare highly redolent of their era. Consider my own. Every Brenda you are everlikely to meet is between 60 and 80, because that was when that given name wasin fashion. Nearly all Lindas are the same, whereas a Madison was surely bornthe year after Splash and is around 40 years old today.
You therefore are foolish indeed to name your Elizabethanheroine Brenda or Madison, and if the novel is set in ancient Rome, all I cansay is for god’s sake don’t! Rome, like many other cultures, had its own namingconventions which you should research carefully. Consult, if you can, actualhistorical documents of the period–books, newspapers, blog posts. Do not relyupon modern interpretations like movies, TV shows, or novels written after theperiod!