Become a patron today! Visit www.patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse
The following is a transcript of this episode. The complete transcript can be found on the show’s website.
[00:00:00] Devin Davis: All I'm saying, guys is that if your one character is Glorfindel and your other character is Ratagast, there had better be a damn good reason why the woman's name is Brenda. Today on Writing in the Tiny House. Hello, hello, hello! And welcome to the show. Welcome to Writing in the Tiny House. I am your host Devin Davis, and I am the guy living in a tiny house who is here to show you that the fictional book that you have in your mind is a thing worth doing. And it's completely possible to do no matter how busy you claim to be.
[00:01:02] So if you compare-- just some side stuff, cause we get to do announcements first. If you compare the sound quality of this episode versus the previous episodes, you might notice that it is different. The reason why is because I have new.
[00:01:19] Sound equipment that I am still getting used to. So while I am figuring out how all of this works, we get to kind of work together and to be patient and kind and all the rest until I have all of this figured out. I'm excited for it. It also means there are a lot more chords on my counter, but it's okay. We're doing it. Over the past few episodes that have been just me, I have realized that there gets to be kind of a workshop or at least a lecture series. I mean, I don't want you to think that we are in school, and that we are here to study, because I am not. However, sometimes with specific ideas, I know that a lot of the people who listen to my podcast are fantasy fanatics, but a lot of the other people who listen to my podcast simply write general fiction. And I believe that some of the things that I'm going to be sharing in these like 101 episodes that I'm going to be putting together over the next few weeks, over the episodes where it's just me, I'm going to be putting together some guidelines and just some thoughts and feelings and just some general directions on where to go with specific things while you are developing the bones and the base of your novel.
[00:02:51] And one of, as one of, one of the points to talk about, which we will be talking about today is names. When we go to write our book sometimes, especially if we are pantsing, if we have not outlined very in depth, sometimes characters seem to just pop up as a way to solve a problem or to create a problem if we need that.
[00:03:17] But sometimes characters just pop up and we don't know who they are. We don't know their names. This happened to me a couple months ago when I got to rip my work in progress in half. And now I have two half finished books. I got to include a new main character as a way to make this new storyline or what used to be a subplot and is now a main plot, in order to make it work, I had to introduce a new main character or at least a new supporting character. And I didn't know who he was. I didn't know his name. I didn't know things about him. And so over the course of several days, I got to kind of imagine and think about him, about the culture that he might've come from. And granted, I'm writing fantasy.
[00:04:12] And so the culture gets to be whatever I want it to be. However, it still gets to be something believable. I'm going to be doing a 101 episode on world building. And part of that is culture in the world that we are inventing. And we'll dive into how the culture ties into characters and how it ties into the overall feeling of towns and villages and family dynamics and different things like that.
[00:04:41] But for the sake of this episode, let's get into the importance of names. And we're going to stick to contemporary fiction or urban fantasy first, and then go into high fantasy where we get Lord of the Rings names and we get dragon names like Ingeloacastimizillion if you are an RA Salvatore fan, and stuff like that. With names, this is my opinion, but I feel that it is a very good opinion. With names, they get to be something that is at least easy to figure out. Mind you, most of your readers are likely going to be American and they are going to be native English speakers. And so it is always helpful if you stick to American English pronunciation guidelines. And the tongue twisters and things can sometimes distract us from developing a relationship with the character.
[00:05:45] I have found that in many of the fantasy stories that I have read, if the names are completely new and foreign and strange to me, I usually just forget them. Especially with audio books, if it doesn't strike a chord with me, I'm not going to keep it around in my mind. If I am reading a printed book or an ebook, if I can't figure out the pronunciation, I am the type of person who hates to pronounce a name wrong.
[00:06:18] I hate that more than anything else. More than a lot of things. And so quite frankly, when I was in high school and Harry Potter was becoming more and more famous and picking up steam, I did not know how to pronounce Hermione's name. And it seemed that nobody in my hometown actually did. And so I would go around asking people for guidance with this. Like, what do you think it's supposed to be? So many people thought that her name was actually "Hermy-un". Her her, her Meehan Hermie own various different, weird things like that. And so I think that is why J K Rowling chose to include in the body of her story some pronunciation parts with Hermione's name, just because I think she realized that many of her readers had no idea how to pronounce her name.
[00:07:19] If you remember, there were some exchanges between Hermione and another student from a different school. I forget which book this is in, but this guy was not a native English speaker and he wasn't pronouncing her name right. And so she got to help him out by pronouncing her own name and spelling out the words as sounds in the text of the story.
[00:07:43] By having her do that, JK Rowling gave us a tool to realize how the flip we're supposed to be pronouncingHermione and how it is not in fact Hermiun. So it's useful to include basic spelling rules, basic pronunciation rules, and tailor them to your target audience. Be mindful that it is likely American English speakers who will be reading your book and it's okay to help them out.
[00:08:13] It's okay to throw them a bone when it comes to developing names. For instance, a good example of this, I was going to include some names in my book and I was going to spell them. So I, I don't like to make up too many names. My names tend to be traditional names. If they belong to one family, then I'm going to go like traditional Roman, or if they belong to another family, then I'll usually pick kind of a different origin for those types of names and try to keep things cohesive and sounding like they belong. But I don't like to make up too many names just because my setting is Victorian. And so I like to have more familiar sounding names. Victorian and we go into Edwardian. And so I like things to be more predictable like that and more familiar.
[00:09:09] But I personally have a love for the traditional spelling of some of the Celtic names like Shivonne and Alva, and some other things like that. There is a character in my book named Alva, but I chose to spell her name A L V A just because American readers are the people who are going to be reading my book. If I were to spell it A I L B H E nobody would know what that is. They would think it would be Ail-buh-huh or Ailby or some unpronounceable problem. I also love the name. Siobhan. Siobhan is traditionally spelled, if you go with the Gaelic spelling, it is traditionally spelled S I O B H A N. I have an old friend named Siobhan who lives in Southern France.
[00:10:11] And it was the first time I had seen her name and I wasn't familiar with Gaelic pronunciation when I first met her. Just the rules for it are different, but I don't expect people to know the rules for Gaelic pronunciations. I don't expect people to know that S I in Gaelic spellings is pronounced Shh, or B H is pronounced with a V sound. I don't expect people to know that. And so if I choose to include the name, I do my best to Americanize it just so people don't have to worry too much about what it's going to be. Or they don't have to worry too much about pronouncing the name wrong. If it's pretty easy to figure out, even if it is a little bit different, I've found it's easier to connect to a character if I can say their name. If you think differently, please go ahead and send me a message on Instagram and we can have a discussion, but that is certainly a guideline that I would choose. Also, if you are writing urban fantasy, or if you are writing contemporary fiction, we can move away from fantasy for a little second.
[00:11:38] A good idea-- and I picked this tidbit from the author Alexa Donne. She is a YA thriller author. And she has some brilliant advice on her Booktube channel on YouTube. She brought a thing to my attention that I wouldn't have thought of before, or I wouldn't have put together the logic of it before.
[00:12:03] If your character is 21 years old, living in a modern time, living in, you know, New York or wherever they are, it means that their name was likely popular when they were born. If you choose to consult like a baby name book, and you choose to look through a baby name book for today, for 2021, those names are for today. Those names are for 2021. If your character is 21 years old, it means that they were born in the year 2000. And the baby book names would likely be sorted differently and chosen differently. If your character is 37, they would have been born in the mid eighties and it is entirely possible that they could have a different name than if they were born in the year 2000 or if they were born in the year 2021. In modern days, I have noticed that there is a resurgence right now of some names that were popular and common when my grandmother was a little girl, which is awesome. But that's how the trends are right now. And so it's important to pay attention to that.
[00:13:32] Also with the names, with the things, sometimes it is also very valuable to think about who this character's parents might've been. It's okay if the parents aren't in the book and it's okay if you don't focus a ton on developing like a character profile for the parents and like giving the dad a job and an address and those different things. But if you picture this kid being straight laced and a rule follower, and always telling the truth, it's possible that character's parents might've been strict or conservative or whatever. And the reason why is because if the parents were more traditional, they would likely name them a more traditional name.
[00:14:26] If the kid was born in the eighties and their parents were more traditional, this kid might have the name of Brittany. If the kid was born in the seventies and the parents were hippies, it might be like Rainbow Star or something. Knowing how the parents would have approached that can be valuable as to how you would name them.
[00:14:47] If the parents are conservative and you want to name the kid like Spike or Blade or something, there should be a very good reason for that. It's just because conservative parents, aren't very likely going to name their kid Blade or Spike or things like that.
[00:15:09] Moving over to high fantasy, I personally like to mimic regions of our world to include in my book, just because of the familiarity of it. I like names to resemble each other. I like family names to resemble each other or a certain culture to kind of have all of the common sounds of names. So the one island village that I have, to me, the culture itself represents to an extent some Japanese village fishermen culture. And so I chose to have all of the names be traditional Japanese. For a family that lives on the mainland on the main continent way further north, for the main family of my series, I have chosen those to be more traditional Roman or traditional Greek. And so we have names like Demetrius and Brontes and different things like that.
[00:16:14] When we're doing that, it is okay to have your names be as off the wall as you want. I mean, heaven knows Lord of the Rings, J R R Tolkien invented like new languages and stuff for the world that he was creating. And the names certainly add to the immersion of that world. Having names, having them all sound the same, having them all be like the Elvish names are absolutely beautiful to me.
[00:16:44] They're very sing song. They're just lovely. They roll off the tongue if you know how to pronounce them. And that's fine. Tolkien is a little bit different. Odds are you are not Tolkien not because of your capacity to write, but because you were not born at the same time that Tolkien was born. You are writing to a modern audience, and a modern audience has different expectations than the audience that Tolkien was writing for back in the day.
[00:17:19] And so things get to be a little bit different just because different people are going to be reading your book. And so if you wish to, it is okay to have some different things resemble things in this real world, just so it can be a bit more approachable and more digestible to your reader, just because remember your reader does not live in your world. It's okay to help them out. And it's okay to have an amount of familiarity with whatever sometimes. If absolutely everything in your manuscript is brand new and requires a ton of explanation because there's nothing in it that is just inherently knowable or inherently understood because it's not common in this real world, then odds are your manuscript will be filled with a lot of info dump. It would be filled with a lot of exposition and it will be really heavy to get through and really hard to kind of wade through. It'd be like wading through like heavy sticky mud.
[00:18:36] So that's it for today. That is this character development 101 episode on characters and names. A quick shout out to my patrons. Thank you so much for your generosity. This show could not be like this without my patrons giving like they do. If you wish to become a patron, go to patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse, and you can get early access to these episodes. You can get an additional episode every month and you can spend quality time with me on our private chat rooms on Discord.
[00:19:10] Again, follow me on social media. My Instagram tag is @authordevindavis, my Twitter is @authordevind. Thank you so much for your time, guys. We will see you next week and have fun writing.
No comments:
Post a Comment