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.

Calder asked me, the other day, how I ’saw’ what I was writing as I wrote it. 

She is very visual. She sees the story almost like a movie as it unfolds in her head, and the hardest part for her is getting that picture down exactly as she sees it, and not losing what she has seen as she translates it to paper.

I had to think about how I do it, and I still couldn’t say for certain. All I can say with certainty is that I seldom see movies.

Most of the time I am inside the character’s head, seeing what he or she is seeing, thinking what he or she is thinking, feeling what he or she is feeling, sometimes even smelling what he or she is smelling. It’s very focused. I couldn’t necessarily even tell you what the view is outside that narrow focus, who else is around in the story. It’s often a nebulous grey area (dark grey) and I have no idea what is happening there.  It’s a bit like a spotlight on the stage. All attention is focused on the spotlight, and everything around it is dark.

Sometimes I can’t even tell you what the main character looks like outside of some general characteristics. Scott, from Barrain, is tall, blonde and obviously nice-looking.  He’s athletic, because he snowboards and skis. Not so long ago he’d be classified as a yuppie—I don’t know what that translates into in this generation. But one person’s nice looking and fit is not the same as someone else’s.  I can’t give you an exact idea of what Scott looks like because I don’t really know.

Ask Calder though, and she could probably give you a police identikit photo of him. And that photo, incidentally, is unlikely to look anything like my version of Scott.

For most us, starting our novel is the easy part. 

An idea comes, or old ideas suddenly click together, and you start writing.  The first chapter or two is good.

I myself have dozens of novel beginnings that I have started and stopped.  Some of them are just waiting for time to complete them. Others are simply dead—sitting in the equivalent of my bottom drawer (the Ideas folder on my PC).  At what stage does one realise that these ideas have died?

Even though we write mostly as a team, Calder and I determine the novel rigor mortis factor a little differently.

Calder will write the first few pages and then hand them to me. It’s raw, unedited and very first draft. If I don’t like it she dices the idea then and there.  If I do, she keeps writing to see if it’s going to work. We know by around chapter three whether it’s working or not.

My criteria for liking or disliking the story are the characters, first and foremost, and whether or not the idea intrigues me.

As for me, I tend to write the first three chapters. By then I know if the story is or isn’t working for me. If it’s not working, it goes into the bottom drawer, Calder unseen. 

If it is working, I go back and do a rough first edit before I hand it over. If Calder likes it, we keep going.

Neither method is perfect—Calder had no say in Shared Memories, for example. I just couldn’t stop, and I would have written it anyway. Luckily she likes it. And some of Calder’s ideas that would make really good stories die an unnecessary early death, but that’s what the bottom drawer is for. We can alway revisit an idea.

In Rework and Edit, in the BBC’s Get Writing section, Barbara Trapido says:

Here is my best advice for editing and revising. READ EVERY WORD OUT LOUD.
Barbara Trapido, Rework and Edit

While the prospect of reading a full 100,000 word novel is more than a little daunting, the advice is sound. It’s amazing how clumsy some word groupings can be.

Even if you don’t read the whole novel, reading aloud just the passages you are having problems with can also help. 

You will find you skip words, or say them in a different order, or replace some words with others. If you stumble over words or phrases you will often go back and reword them so that you can say them, which you wouldn’t do if you were not reading aloud.

It’s a good idea to have someone else listening, or to tape your reading, so that they can pick up on things you don’t.

A truly useful exercise.

I read sites like Evil Editor, the now defunct Miss Snark, and various others who take reader’s queries and analyse them on line.  I’m at the stage where I can see a query that grabs me, but I still can’t write one.

It’s really illuminating to read the comments associated with the sample queries on the above sites.  You learn how other people perceive your book just from those few lines, and it’s usually totally the wrong way.  I once submitted a query letter that was worded in such a way that everyone assumed the good guy was bad.  Nasty bad.  How can you do that?

Every once in a while the author posts a comment explaining, “No, that’s not it at all.  What happens is …”  and in two or three paragraphs explains the whole thing beautifully.

That’s it.  The perfect query.

I can see how it’s done.  Simply explain the story.  Tell it as if you were telling someone else what happens, and do it in a couple of paragraphs.

It’s not that easy.

I don’t ‘tell’ a good story at all.  I can’t even tell a joke without messing up the punchline.  By the time I have finished explaining the story line …

Scott accidentally gets dragged into another world and has to survive or find a way home.  Meantime, back at home, the policeman on the case ….

… it starts to sound as clinical and boring as the original query.

No, for me the best way to hone a query is to get feedback.  Not just feedback from Calder, because we both seem to be stuck in the same rut here, but feedback from lots of different people. 

The bloggers who analyse queries provide a precious gift.

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

Some writers create elaborate worlds before they start writing their fantasy or science fiction novel.  These writers create maps.  They know the of every creek and hilltop, the world history back to ten generations, particularly the lineage of their protagonist.

Other writers let the world evolve as they write the book.

We fall into the second category. We start with a character and a situation, and discover the world along with the story.  We do this even with stories like Rainbow, where the world is so integral to the story it is almost a character in itself.

It has some problems. 

Shared Memories started out as fantasy and morphed into science fiction.  That took some world changes we were still fixing into the third draft.  It also made it very soft science fiction (as distinct from hard science fiction, which has heavier doses of technology).

Given that we don’t plan out the world in advance, we then have to do it as part of the draft process.  It’s usually part of draft two, closer to the start of the rewrite than the end.

Once we have a story we go through it and plot the locations on a map. 

With Barrain, we would only map Barrain, not Earth.

We start the map with two points.  Elna’s village, and Demon City.  Elna’s village is in the mountains.  Mark in some mountains.  Demon City used to be known as the City Between Sea and Mountain—that makes us think it’s close to the coast, but also close to a mountain.  Place it near the coast, but not on it, near more mountains with a narrow hinterland. 

It takes weeks to get to the city.  Do they walk the whole way?  If so, how far can we walk in a day?  These people are fitter than us, and younger, so they will walk maybe twice as far.  (Right now we are horribly unfit.)

Multiply the kilometres walked per day by the number of days on the road and we get an idea of the scale.

We fill in other bits of the map from details of the journey as per the novel.  Once we’re done we might fill in blank bits of the map if we feel like it, but mostly we don’t.

And that’s pretty much it.  Our world map.  We stick it in front of the draft and that’s the master, and only copy.

I was rereading some of the Wordplay ‘Hall of Fame‘ posts last night and came across this little gem from Seth:

Metaphorically speaking, an agent is not a fairy godmother. An agent is a virus. They are opportunistic parasites with no ability to survive without the presence of a host organism - namely you…

 … So if you’ve got one blindingly good script and I’ve got three reasonably good scripts, chances are good I will get more notice than you … One big rock does not a career make - an agent needs to know that if he takes a pickaxe to you you’re likely to come up with a few more gems in the rough.

Seth, Stop acting like a diamond and start acting like a diamond mine, on Wordplay.

Love the analogy, love the message he was trying to get across.  Agents rely on writers to make them money.  No matter how good your one story is (Seth was talking about scripts, but it applies equally to novels), it just isn’t enough.  You have to keep producing. Otherwise your agent will jump hosts.

If you have been reading the same sites I have, you will notice that as a writer, eventually you will need some sort of presence on the web.

It seems that even for an unpublished writer trying to get an agent a place on the web is a good thing.

Be warned, however, that a bad web presence can often be worse than no presence at all, so if you are going to do it, you must make an effort.

For a writer, this includes:

• A site that looks professional.  A gaudy site with lots of flashing things on it is the equivalent to turning up to a business meeting in a tatty old track suit
• A site that has few or no typos, spelling or grammatical errors. We all make these, it’s just that as writers people expect us to have less (or preferably none).  We need to be more diligent.
• A web site that is up-to-date.  Even if your website does not include date specific information, ensure it still looks topical by keeping the copyright notice current and removing obsolete references or dead pages.

Despite all this, you decide to go ahead.  What else do you need to think about?

• Cost—Do you want to pay for your own web site or do you want to use something free, such as Blogger, My Space or Live Journal?
• Can you afford, or even do you want, to pay to have your web designed
• How much time can you afford to maintain it?
• How much effort do you want to spend on it?

All these questions need to be considered when thinking about a web presence.

Even if you don’t want a web presence yet, at least think about buying your author domain name.  (We own www.rowandai.com.) It’s relatively inexpensive, and you don’t have to do anything with it, it just saves it for when you do need it.

When you write a novel the basic premise must be believeable, or otherwise you lose the reader.  It only takes one major flaw to lose the reader. 

I have been doing a lot of thinking about story logic lately.  Barrain has at least one flaw where I know we can potentially lose readers at the beginning of the novel, and that is in the language (another blog on this soon).  But we’re not the only ones who do it.

Vampire novels are big at the moment.  Everyone seems to be reading them; everyone seems to be writing them.  They are popular in both adult and young-adult fiction.

Werewolves are popular too. 

One young-adult story idea that seems to crop up a lot is the 12-15 year old who got turned into a vampire or a werewolf a 100 years ago.  The story revolves around how these ‘children’ fit into normal school life of today.

Leaving aside the impracticalities of vampires attending a day school, what is the obvious flaw in a story like this?

These ‘children’ are 100 years old.

They will not have the same angst and dramas of the average 12-15 year old.  They are long past that.

I have come across three stories (unpublished) in the last two months that base their whole premise on this exact scenario.

‘Six year old’ Claudia, from Anne Rice’s Interview With a Vampire, is probably a more realistic representation of what someone like this would be like, at least, the bad guy version of someone like this, anyway.