Author: Karen

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 Sherylyn 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,” Sherylyn 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,” Sherylyn 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,” Sherylyn 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.

Good guys	Bad guys
Aidan Aled Alun Arrax Blade Caid Grenn Hamill Hanna Kalli Kym Mathers Melanda Rhetta Roland Scott Tegan	Callen Chaffen Julan Vanora Van Wallah Vas Vasst

 

Sherylyn 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.

At the writing group I started attending this year it frustrates some of the other members that they don’t get a real sense of place in my story. They don’t get descriptions—of people, or of places. They want more.

For me, sometimes, when I read their stories, I want less. I want my readers to use their own imagination to flesh out the characters. I don’t need to know that the protagonist has long red hair that falls in ringlets to her waist; that she has green eyes that reflect the colour of the grass; that she has a tiny rosebud mouth just ripe for kissing, and skin that freckles easily in the sun, and on and on. I don’t need a photo-ID. Maybe all I need to know is that her red hair frizzes up when it rains.

Likewise, I don’t need to know down to every minute detail exactly what the house looks like.

In fact, when I read books with long descriptive passages I often skim them.

It can have interesting consequences. There are books I re-read frequently, and it’s only years later that I suddenly realise one character has red hair, for example, when all those years I have been imagining them with black hair. Or that someone has freckles, or ivory skin. In fact, I recall one book—I think it was Ursula le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness—where I never realised the main character, Genly Ai, was black, and I know she told us.

Science fiction and fantasy writers —and writers of historical fiction—often need to include more description about their worlds to enable the reader to see the place they are writing about.

Packing to go away seems so much harder than it used to be.

Once it was just throw some clothes into a bag and we’re ready. Anything we’d forgotten we bought along the way.

Nowadays the clothes are the least of my worries.

Have I got my mobile phone? Have I packed the phone charger?

Next it’s the work in progress. Have I copied the novel I am working on onto the laptop? What about my current research?

Then it’s the computer itself. Is the laptop packed? What about the accessories, especially the power cable. And the mouse for those days when the touchpad is just too much? What about the wireless card? And the phone-away number for the wireless card? Are we sure the place we have booked has wi-fi access? Do we have a flash drive, just in case?

There’s an extra bag for the PC and all its consumables. There’s an extra bag for all the paperwork we need to carry. The car boot is full, and we’re only driving to the airport.

I want to do NaNoWriMo. I have wanted to do it for the last three years.

Last year, when I was I flat-out busy, I promised myself, “Next year.”

Hah. I haven’t even had time to blog for a month, let alone write much of my novel. (I’m snatching every minute I can to write in my notebook. I now have three full notebooks waiting to be transcribed to computer.)

As for NaNoWriMo, I’ve got Buckley’s*.

Until now everyone has been very supportive of NaNoWriMo. But this year I’m reading a lot more, “Arghh, no. Not again,” comments, and “Please don’t send out your NaNoWriMo novels.”

It’s almost a victim of its own success.

I’m a strong believer in NaNoWriMo. I think it is a fantastic way to force yourself to write. Look at me, in the last two months I’ve written hardly anything. If I did NaNoWriMo I would be 50,000 words better off at the end this month.

But because of the pace, what you write is also only a first draft. Most first drafts stink. You have to rewrite, refine and polish. So even though you’re overjoyed to be finished at the end of Novemeber, do yourself and NaNoWriMo a favour. Put the story away for a month or two (unless you want to start on draft 2 immediately), then take it out and re-read it before you send it anywhere. You will be glad you did.

Also, the place to say “I wrote this as part of NaNoWriMo” is not in your query letter, it’s in the introductory blurb at the start of the book after it’s published.

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*
‘Buckley’s’ is an Australian slang meaning ‘no chance whatsoever’. I used to think it was named after an explorer who didn’t make it where he wanted to. Looking it up for this blog, Frederick Ludowyk says its origins are obscure. We also used to have a major department store named “Buckley and Nunn”, so it became a sort of an in joke. “What chance do we have?” “Buckley’s and none.”

This is the third time I have taken Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World, the first book in his Wheel of Time series out of the library to read. It will be the third time I return it to the library unread. I try a chapter or two, and then put it down. I just can’t get into it.

Most of my friends love Robert Jordan. Especially the first few books, they say, and then they go on to grumble that he is [was] taking such a long time to get to the end of the story and that their interest dies off in the last few. When Brandon Sanderson completes the last novel (started by Jordan, who died in 2007) this will be the twelfth book in the series.

When does a series become too long?

I love a good series. If I have characters I really love I keep waiting for the next book, wanting to read about them again and again. But … I do lose interest. After about the sixth book I stop reading. Part of this is me. The character stops being exciting for me. Part of it is the author too. Imagine living with the same characters year in, year out. It would get boring, dispiriting even.

Sometimes it’s for contractual reasons, but sometimes authors remain with a good selling series long after its use-by date. I see this more in mystery than in fantasy and science fiction. Patricia Cornwall’s Kay Scarpetta, Dell Shannon’s Mendoza, J.A. Jance’s Joanna Brady, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes —I could go on and on. Some, like Conan Doyle, get so sick of their characters they try to kill them off. In others, Patricia Cornwall, for example, the stories become more gruesome with each book.

Many authors, like C. J. Cherryh with her Foreigner series, introduce new characters (Cajeiri) to breathe new life into the story.

Me, if I had a long-running series with popular characters, I’d like to do it the way Robin Hobb did. She believed she was definitely finished with Fitz and the Fool after the Assassin trilogy. She started a new three-book series set in the same world but with different characters. I don’t know if she meant the Fool to creep in, starting out as a minor character, then getting a bigger part, but the Fool’s like that. Once she did this though, she went back and wrote the Tawny Man trilogy about Fitz and Fool, and tied all three series together. After this she wrote a completely different trilogy altogether, the Soldier Son series. I live in hopes she’ll write another Fitz/Fool story but the point is that she didn’t write the second set until she’d had a break from them, until she was ready. I think that made for a much better story than a tired run-on from the previous one.

The other day I wrote about my first experiences in a face-to-face writing group.

One other thing I learned. I am so out of it when it comes to science fiction and fantasy.

The coordinator brought in a number of science fiction books recently published in Australia. I had not read one of them.

The younger people in the group are heavily influenced by Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica and a little bit of Star Trek. Other reviewers picked up on similarities to these shows that went totally over my head. One writer seemed to be almost writing a spin-off of one of the shows.

I once read an agent’s blog where the agent reviewed queries sent in by readers. This agent didn’t represent science fiction or fantasy normally (or a lot of other things that came through), but she reviewed everything that came through for this particular exercise. She found a couple of SF queries she liked. I remember my reaction was that the ideas she liked were out of date. They had been done to death twenty years earlier and science fiction had matured way beyond that, but she didn’t know the genre, so she didn’t know that.

That’s how I feel right now about about science fiction and fantasy. I am so out of touch.

So how come I am still finding new books to read?