-_-uuu… so much for updating regularly! Better late than never, though, right?

            My topic in this entry is relatively a simple one: How do you name your characters? If you’re like me, you detest simple names like Jane, Lisa, Jim, or Henry and you constantly struggle to give your character a name that is both distinctive and tasteful without making it something outrageous like Philomena or anything else that sounds like it came from a Barbie movie or one of those Lord of the Rings rip-off fantasies. So, what do we do? Well, that’s what you’re going to be telling me in a bit, I hope.

            My current method involves nicknaming the character according to his role (the leader, or the main guy if he’s the protagonist) and letting him develop at least as far as the first chapter before I obsess over the name. Too often, we don’t see how much baggage a name carries. Whether you realize it or not, whenever you hear a name, it probably reminds you of a certain character or someone in real life with a similar name. To avoid loading a character with preconceptions before completely planning him out, I would figure out his overall personality before naming him. Once in a while, an appropriate name strikes you immediately, but more often than not, you will probably go through several awkward names before settling on the one that suits your protagonist. This works especially well for secondary characters as they often don’t need a clear identity until later on when you’ve finished outlining your plot.  

            Another way to go about this is drawing your character in your mind and naming him based on what he looks like. We all think, when we look at certain people, “He looks like a David”, or “She looks like a Megan”, based on the people we’ve met in the past with those names or something more abstract like the sound of the name and what we associate with it. Whatever the reason, certain looks inspire certain names.

            This isn’t usually where it gets difficult though. It’s the later stage of finding a somewhat unique name or one that alludes to something that is meaningful to your character that’s harrowing. You know you’re thinking far too hard when you spend hours on babynames.com trying to find a name that means “noble but unsure of himself”, or something of the like. If I knew any way to get past this point besides perseverance and luck, I would tell you. But this time, I have few suggestions of my own so you’ve got to help me.

            So, what do you do when you and your friend throw names back and forth at one another and still have no success? In short, what do you do when all a character’s names sound wrong for her?!

This entry goes out to every poor soul who has ever had trouble writing dialogue for characters. I think it goes without saying that the private thoughts of the main character come out much more fluidly than the words they use to express them. I guess this is in part because when we speak in real life, our thoughts go through an imaginary filter and are refined before they come out. Thoughts, on the other hand, are raw and ready-to-use.

I mean, you already know that speaking in reality is much easier than writing dialogue for your characters, even though talking is something you probably do every day. But, why? Again, though you might be sick of it, I’m going to try and find the answer in one of the books my friend and I were looking through for tips writing our story. There was a book we found online that showed the top thirty or fifty mistakes fiction writers make and one of them was basing the characters off of real people. So, what does this have to do with dialogue? It has everything to do with it because the thing we worry most about dialogue sometimes is whether a real person would say this. Whereas, we probably don’t need to worry about this since the best fictional characters are never entirely real. The book I read with my friend says that characters based PURELY on real people or only on what a real person would do or say, are boring. If you think about it, this is true because if we were as bold or crazy as the characters in stories, maybe real life would be an adventure. However, most of us are much too practical to be the main character of a story without some serious caricaturizing. So, the best fictional character would be someone sensible and realistic enough to relate to but who is at the same time, exaggerated a tiny bit so they’re actions and behavior are dramatic enough to carry a story. 

Even though it looks like I went off on a tangent there, I’m sure you can see that my point is that dialogue should follow the same rules. Characters are allowed to say dramatic things we might not in reality. They’re allowed to skip normal small talk to get right to the part where their speech actually helps reveal their character. 

I did find an article online on the mistakes made commonly in writing dialogue and ways to improve if you’d like to check it out: 

http://www.pammc.com/dialogue.htm 

I know there’re lots of other mechanical implications in writing dialogue. My personal pet peeve (and I’m not judging people who do this since I’m guilty of it myself) is the overuse of synonyms for “said”. I hate it when characters retort, mutter, hiss, howl, or grumble every other line. I know I encouraged a slight bit of exaggeration but only a schizophrenic would change his/her tone that often. 

With that, I’m going to end the entry because if I had a true solution to the problem of dialogue, I wouldn’t be writing this entry. Go ahead and tell me about some of your problems writing dialogue and what you did to get over them (if you’ve found something that’s helped you, I’d love to know).

Lately, my friend and I have done a lot of research on writing; we both love writing and we’re currently collaborating on a story.

            During our explorations, there was one thing that stood out in my mind called the world-building trap which is common with fantasy writers who fall in love with the world and setting they create on paper and end up putting more of their creative effort into the setting of their story than the plot and characters and that move it forward.

            The author of the book described this as a trap that writers fall into that isn’t necessarily helpful to the overall story but I can definitely see why it would help and why it’s not always a drawback.

            The writer that comes to mind immediately when I think of world-building is J.R.R. Tolkien. I don’t know of any other author who planned his/her world in the depth that Mr. Tolkien has. I mean, The Silmarillion? He had even planned out the mythology of the world BEFORE hobbits, men or elves came into being. He is almost literally the god of a world handcrafted with the utmost love and care. Even if Tolkien’s book might not have needed all the information put in The Silmarillion, the Lord of the Rings phenomenon would not have been what it was without the extensive blueprint Tolkien had made for a world that went beyond what would be in his books. 
           

            I think, as writers, we all have our own version of this benign disease. In fact, even though I would advise other writers to FIRST figure out their plot and characters (and this is from personal experience), I would also encourage them to develop their settings further. My favorite world-building medium is probably art. I love drawing the characters of stories as I might’ve mentioned before. To me, a visual is the true beginning of a story. Words only exist to conjure up in other people’s mind what you initially imagined in yours, to communicate the story you saw. In fact, my friend agrees and says that she sees our writing like a movie playing out in our head, and based on the movie, we choose the words that would best express what we see. 
             

            Getting back to the point, you of course don’t need to compose a soundtrack to your story or draw out maps of the places and characters… but you want to sometimes, don’t you? – Maybe if you were weirder like me – But I can see why world-building or, in other words, developing a story beyond what we write on paper, can be infinitely beneficial to us.

           
            The reason I adore Rowling's writing and the Harry Potter series so much is that the world and characters are written out so carefully. It seems that Rowling spent a good few years planning out the wizarding world before she ever put pen to paper to write the actual story. I think the mark of a quality fantasy work is its ability to make the reader curious about the story beyond what’s written in the book. For instance, even though the seven books are done, we want to know what Lupin was like as a child before he went to Hogwarts, we want to know Dumbledore’s great grandmother’s middle name as Rowling put it. We want to know about a hundred things that don’t have so much to do with Harry, Ron and Hermione’s story but spark our imaginations anyway. That’s why The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Quidditch through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find them were published. It’s proof that the same creativity that drives us to write fanfictions is what causes us to speculate on the vague regions of a story that aren’t drawn out in the book. When an author plans these things out anyway, subconsciously, he/she just does a better job of writing. It’s almost as if we, the readers, sense that there is a universe coyly hiding between the lines on the page, waiting to be discovered.

            Having said that, I know that the author of the book I mentioned way, way, WAY at the beginning of this entry has a point. World and character building can be overdone when the people who read your story are bored by the outside details rather than fascinated by them. As someone who likes sketching characters all the time, the best analogy I could make to this is drawing the skeleton of a person before drawing the outside. If you’re an artist you know that when you start sketching a face, you draw the outline of the head or the little cross that marks where the eyes and nose will go. Some people go further and draw the joints of the characters and stick versions of their pose. This kind of skeleton is helpful and makes the drawing more realistic and gives it the illusion of depth. However, unless you’re taking a course on human anatomy (which could be neat) you are not going to draw out the entire skeleton, muscles and organs of a person before sketching the outside (unless you feel like it).

            But I think world-building in general should not be discouraged. One of the main reasons we write is to create our own world and who could blame us? If you have the basic outline of your story and take care not to get bogged down too much, I say go for it. I’m all for world-building. 

... Penny for your thoughts on the matter?

It might just be me and my friends, but I think lots of people, people who aren't inherently good writers or readers, have tried to write stories. I have and even though I do like to write and read, I've failed and then later got turned on to fanfictions (I've stopped writing them now of course). I think fanfictions were actually good practice for writing. The first fanfictions I wrote were Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings cross-overs. Are you cringing with contact embarrassment yet? In my defense, everyone was doing it (every child of the 90's probably knows what a huge phenomenon fanfictions were and are... along with the fanart) and if it wasn't Harry Potter, it was Yu-Gi-Oh, or Pokémon. I'm serious, there were even fanfictions about those (some good ones too). Anyway, the reason it was so helpful was, as anyone who has written fanfiction will tell you, is that you basically have a made up story, and ready-made characters and a world and all you have to do is reshape the story to your whim. You also get practice by imitating the author you like by writing them.

But, of course, that's not enough. We need to try our own hand at it, and that's when it becomes difficult. I think I speak for everyone when I say it's really hard to find an idea that'll carry past the first few chapters. For me, it's not always even that I don't know what happens next but that, the more and more I think about my story, the lamer it seems to me. Have you ever done that? Read through your own writing in order to edit and positively cringed, even though, a couple hours ago, it sounded like the greatest thing you'd ever written? There does seem to be an antidote to this, but I'll get to that maybe in another entry.

SO, why AM I writing this somewhat rambling first entry?
It might be a roundabout way of getting to the point, but this is sort of an introduction post to state the (main) purpose of this blog; to discuss the process of making a story. Emphasis on the "making" because it's not just about writing; a lot of you know that you get this sort of synesthesia when you try thinking of ideas sometimes and music you listen to and artwork that you see sort of give you inspiration and in turn, tell their owns stories. And when I say story, it doesn't have to be a novel, a movie or a play but any form of telling a story. Some people compose or find music that would suit the story or draw the characters and places to better solidify them. This blog is to discuss all of that and more... there will be of course some random stuff too. 

It just seems like creating a story encompasses almost all the different art forms and therefore would be easier to write about and at the same time not seem completely aimless… I’m not much in the mood for a personal diary or a fashion blog. So I hope this works.

To wrap up here's an article on this subject by an author I've recently come to like:

http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/Cool_Stuff/Essays/Essays_By_Neil/Where_do_you_get_your_ideas%3F

Enjoy!