How different are the names of characters in your novel?

Progress on Barrain has come to a standstill at present as I am concentrating on the novel for my critiquing group.

I gave Calder the first 30,000 words to read last night.

It’s a difficult story to write in that I am trying to hide the true identity of one of the characters, to keep the reader guessing who it is until the end of the story.

“Well,” Calder said at the end. “I know it’s not Vas.”

It wasn’t Vas, but I was trying not to give away who it was, so I asked, trying to sound surprised, “Why wouldn’t it be him?”

“Because of the name,” she said. “You would never name a hero Vas.”

She went on to remind me that we had a character named Vasst in Potion,  a spineless group leader who turned traitor. We also have Vlad the Impaler in a story idea we have yet to write.

“Which leaves Hanna and Julan as the only two people it can be,” Calder said. “And I don’t think it’s Julan because Julian was the bad guy in Shared Memories, so it must be Hanna.”

It was Hanna, in fact, but I had gone to a lot of effort to make Julan feisty and likeable, so that most readers would think it was her.

Flabbergasted is probably too strong a word to describe how I felt, but it did make me pause.

“Arrax is a hero, of course,” Calder said. “Because his name starts with ‘A’. A lot of your heroes have ‘A’ names.”

Arrax is the hero. And yes, in prior books, both Alun and Aled have been heroes too.

I made a list of names and characters in our stories.

Calder did have a point.

There were other similarities. Lots of ‘n’ and ’l’ sounds in the names. One or two syllable names, particularly for the good guys. And definitely a trend to bad guys with names starting with ‘V’.

I have to rethink some character names.

I am doing more writing, although it is not yet reflected in the word count.

A lot of it is putting back story into what has already been written.

The writing is clumsy at the moment; phrasing is awkward, with lots of cliches. Where I see them I take them out, but at the moment I figure that bad writing is better than no writing at all.

The story is much stronger.

The most interesting change to date is how Scott has become less of the main character. Taliah and Mathers are coming into it more.

Here’s a dilemma I never expected to have. All our books are starting to sound the same.

Okay, that may be an exaggeration, but I am noticing aspects of one book creeping into other books.

Take Barrain, for instance. As part of the rewrite for this draft we introduced a substance called bloodleaf, so named because it reacts with the blood and that reaction is important to the story.

In Potion we gave a substance called bloodstone, so named because it reacts with the blood. That reaction is important to the story.

In Barrain Caid is a nice guy but most people think of him as cold and distant, initially at least. In Potion Alun is a nice guy, but most people think of him as cold and distant at first too. Both of them have heavy responsibilities.

These two stories are different. One is a rescue mission, the other is the story of a man who is stranded outside his own world.

And yet, how different are they really? Sometimes I find myself writing things Scott, in Barrain, says that I know could equally well be said by Blade, the point-of-view character in Potion.

Are we writing the same book over and over? I don’t think so.

Are we using the same main characters over and over? That I’m not so sure about.

In the next draft of Barrain we will really have to look at Scott’s and Caid’s characters to ensure that they are unique, and not just badly formed clones of Blade and Alun.

My little pep-talk of the other day seems to have done me some good. I’m getting back into Barrain, slowly, but steadily.

At present I am I am going back, rewriting earlier bits so that I can continue with the story in its new form. One of the reasons I got stuck is because we didn’t know why. We didn’t know why Kraa was after Caid, we didn’t know why Caid was so important, we didn’t know how Scott was going to get back home, or even why Kraa would be chasing him once he got there. Now we do.

Calder and I talk about the novel, but this work is mine. She can’t do much until I have finished the draft.

You may think it strange that we don’t know important things like this well into the third draft of the story, but that’s how it works for us. And we’re not alone. After all, if it took M. Night Shyamalan five drafts in Sixth Sense to realise his protagonist was dead, and another five to tidy it up we’re up there with some of the best.

People who outline cannot imagine how we work. “All that extra rewriting you have to do.” But it works for us. It’s a bit like carving a piece of wood. You start off with a nice looking piece of timber (the idea), and you have a rough idea of what the end result will look like, but then you come to a knot, and have to carve around that, so your design changes, and then you see that with the changes you have made because of that knot then the design can be made better by changing it, and because you have made those changes you can see other changes, and so on. Until finally, you have your finished carving (novel) and it’s nothing like the original log of wood, or even what you first imagined it would be.

Terrible progress over the last month.  Work has been frantic and some personal stuff got in the way as well. Life has been one constant round of get up, go to work, come home, eat, sleep and then get up and do it all again.  I’m exhausted.

Our average, over the last month and a half, has been 60 words a day.

And to think that this year I had planned to take part in NaNoWriMo.  Hah.

We jumped a big chunk of text with a “fill in here” note.

It feels good, and it’s allowing us to get back into the story.

It’s funny how you can become so focussed on getting a particular scene done that it stops you cold.

It will be interesting, when we are done, to see if we even needed that scene at all.  I suspect not.

Latest excerpt posted.  Cannot believe the book is moving so slowly.  Life and work deadlines keep getting in the way.  Like many would-be writers, I so want to live that dream of being able to work full-time on your novel. However, there are mortgages to meet, bills to pay.

I have set a new goal.  Complete the initial write of draft three by the end of this year.  Let’s see if we can do it.

Warning: Minor spoiler alerts for Renegade’s Magic.

I just finished reading Renegade’s Magic, Robin Hobb’s third book in the Soldier Son series, I enjoyed it so much that I read it in one sitting. It’s a big book, it took all day and I hardly moved from the couch.  I’m stiff now.

As I got into the story I couldn’t thinking, “Two people in one body. Oh, I wish I had thought of this idea first.”

Holly Lisle wrote that when she reads something wonderful, her reactions vary from …

“… huge envious green goose bumps, because I know there’s no way in hell I could have ever written that book or story … sometimes I am moved to unenvious rapture —I love what I’ve read, but I have no desire to emulate it …[and] sometimes I am filled with passion and wicked larceny—what I read thrills me and catches at my gut and at my imagination and I just have to steal some part of it for myself ”
Holly Lisle, How to (legally and ethically) steal ideas

While I doubt that we will ever write a story about two people in the same body—especially after this blog—Holly Lisle gives some good pointers on How to (legally and ethically) steal ideas. The key is to take the germ of the idea that really grabs you, just the germ, nothing else, and to change everything else so that it’s really unrecognisable.

And that’s fine by me. Most of Renegade’s Magic brings out in me the ‘unenvious rapture’ of loving the story, but I don’t want to emulate it. Sometimes, while I am reading I think, “How on earth can Robin Hobb think up ideas like that? Look what she’s doing to poor Nevare now. How can she take the story in that direction and still make it work?” I cannot even imagine doing it myself.

No. If we came up with a two people in one mind story I doubt it would even be a fantasy. It would be science fiction. (See how my mind is ticking over with possibilities, even though my head is saying no, we’ll never do it.) Our two definitely wouldn’t be a mage asundered, nor would they be two parts of the same person. No, our shared body story would have two distinct individuals, somehow thrust together into one container. The only things they would have in common with Hobb’s book would be the two minds in one body, and the fact that neither of them really liked it.

It’s what Holly Lisle calls ‘ethical thievery’.

Some writers are organised.  They create an outline and write their novel from that.  While the story may deviate a little it is basically in place before they start. 

Others just start writing, and end up with this big, overblown mess that’s full of holes.  They have to chop and tweak and move things around and add extra bits.

We’re one of the messy ones.

As a result, we probably write three times as much as we need to (not all in the same draft).  Our working out is done on the pages of the novel, rather than beforehand.  What goes into the first draft may not remain in later drafts.

Even so, a lot of what you cut is not wasted.  It ends up as back story.  You know your characters and your worlds so much better because of this back story.

Occasionally that information even comes in useful in unexpected ways in later drafts.

In draft 1 of Barrain we had a sub-plot where Scott was fed a drug called casseye. It was odourless and tasteless.  Barrainers fed it to their slaves to make them docile.

We got rid of the sub-plot in the second draft, and we got rid of the slaves.  Neither were necessary to the story.

Then here we are in draft three, trying to work out how Caid and his group could possibly have committed the massacre that starts the story.  And suddenly we have it. 

Casseye.  Of course.

So if you’re messy writers like us, don’t despair over those big chunks you have to cut.  They’re still useful.  And who knows, they may even come back into the story in a different guise in a later draft.

Music is important to me when I write.  It helps set the mood for the story and makes it easier to start writing.  It’s part of the routine of writing.  I find I write better when I have music to listen to. 

It has to be a particular type of music though, and the music is different for each novel.  I know one novel I wrote way back when (one of those under the bed, never to see the light of day) was written to a combination of MeatLoaf’s Bat Out of Hell and seemingly the whole Chris de Burgh back catalogue.  Another one had a lot of Carmina Burana in it.

Changing the music spoils the mood.  No matter how much I think I can listen to something else, I have to introduce new music to the collection gradually, because if it doesn’t fit it spoils the writing flow, and then I have to get back into it.

One of the things I like is when a writer says in the introduction to their novel what music they listened to when they wrote it.  Just for fun I thought I might list my own current writing music.  This is for two novels—Barrain and Shared Memories, because we’re writing different drafts of these at the same time.

• Va Pensero, the Ten Tenors, from Bravo Act II
• Hoki Hoki Tona Mai, Yulia, from Bravo Act II
• Anthem, Anthony Warlow, from Chess
• Conquest of Paradise, Vangelis, from 1492
• Any Fool Could See, various, from Paris
• What Could Go Wrong?, Trevor White/John Parr, from Paris
• Trust in Your Heart, John Parr, from Paris
• Just Show Me How to Love You, Jose Cura/Sarah Brightman/Andrea Bocelli/LSO, from Time to Say Goodbye
• The Medallion Calls, Klaus Badelt, from Pirates of the Caribbean Curse of the Black Pearl
• One Last Shot, Klaus Badelt, from Pirates of the Caribbean Curse of the Black Pearl
• He’s a Pirate, Klaus Badelt, from Pirates of the Caribbean Curse of the Black Pearl
• If Only, Original cast, Whistle Down the Wind
• Lakme H2O (Flower Duet), Opera Babes, from Beyond Imagination
• Silk Road, Kitaro (but I like the LSO’s version too), from Kitaro’s Silk Road Suite)
• Hymn to New England, John Williams, from An American Journey
• Just When I’d Given Up Dreaming, Ronan Keating, from Bring You Home