Choosing A Title

Now this is where I really struggle. I find it fairly easy to write a story, because the words flow quickly and I don’t let my inner editor rear its ugly head until I’ve got a basic story I’m really happy with (which is why I’m writing the three books before allowing my editor to remove/add bits to it, mainly adding in the case of book 1!). I don’t bother with naming chapters (I used to, inspired by Harry Potter, until it got too hard to think of what to call them and all my name ideas sounded really stupid) and, as I said before, naming characters came relatively easy this time. However, naming the books themselves? Oooh dear!

I have a basic title for the series itself, but I don’t like it – it really is just a working title, and if my books were to ever be published (wishful thinking really), it would definitely change because it’s so cliche’d and has probably been done before, so I don’t want to copy anyone. It’s literally only used to identify which folder on my computer I’ve saved the files in, that’s how little I like it. I don’t even refer to the series by it – I just call it “my books” or “my writing”, on the rare occasions when I actually talk face-to-face to people about my writing (it doesn’t happen often, other than with my boyfriend because I feel comfortable discussing writing with him).

I don’t know what the series title will end up being – I want it to be something linked to the actual stories, but not sounding stupid and giving away the whole plot. As for the books themselves, I only have one definitive title, and that’s for the book I’m writing at the moment, but I’m not going to give away the title yet 😉 the first one is just referred to as “the first book”, and whilst I have a tentative idea for the third one, it’s still just referred to as the third book, or not spoken about at all 😉 I’m quite pleased with the title of the second one, because it came very easily and is definitely linked to the plot of the book, but for the other ones, I’m not sure what to do with it. As for the sequel to the trilogy, I’m thinking of making it just the name of the main character in it, or a similar one-word title which again, I’m not going to divulge!

I already know the basic plots of the stories, but I think the titles will come a lot easier when I have the finished products of them all – fully written and edited and I’ll know what a good title for them could be. I used to be fairly good at coming up with titles for stories – I was very proud of one trilogy I had planned, and I know the first one was called Black and White, the second was Colourblind and the third was something equally cool but equally cheesy, and yet at the time (I think I was only fourteen when I came up with them!) I thought they were amazing!

I guess that’s another thing that shows how someone’s writing matures as they (and their characters, even!) grow as a writer – look at J.K Rowling. It started off with titles such as “Philosopher’s Stone”, “Chamber of Secrets” – awesome titles, but they don’t particularly strike fear into the reader’s heart, or come across as particularly serious. Then we move on, and we get “Half-Blood Prince” in Book 6, which suggests something quite mysterious and the mystery of not knowing who the half-blood prince was, and as for the Deathly Hallows – we knew there’d be death involved, and the title was dark and mysterious and at the same time, absolutely related to what happens in the story itself.

I could go on and on about JK Rowling for ages because it is her books that made me such an avid reader, and it is being an avid reader that made me so determined to be a good writer, but I’ll leave that for another post on another day.

Naming Characters

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about how I do something – I think the last one may have been writing about first kisses ages ago? – so, I shall do a new one today, about how I come up with the names for my characters.

Usually, in all the books I’ve attempted to write before, I’ve picked ones that have specific meanings, or are literary names – for example, in a previous one, the heroine was called Hero Bronte Murphy (before I developed a deep-seated hatred for whichever Bronte sister wrote Wuthering Heights [I really should figure this out before I sit the Wuthering Heights exam in June]) – Hero because of the character from “Much Ado About Nothing” (again, before we started studying it in English) and Bronte because of the literary connotations (my justification for this is because it’s set fairly far in the future and deals with humans away from Earth, the parents would want to keep the memory of classic literature alive).

Then, when it came to this one, naming characters came very naturally. There was no looking online or searching for fancy meanings – all the names just occurred to me when I was writing about the characters. The two main characters are called Lilly and Adam – Lilly because I was reading Harry Potter at the time, and Adam because it seems to sound nice with Lilly and is a fairly modern man’s name, which is what I was looking for. There is a Welsh Celtic warrior called Daeron Pentraeth – Daeron was just a celtic-sounding one, and I wanted it to begin with a D because of the person his character is very loosely based on. Pentraeth is Welsh for head of the beach, and to be honest there’s no real meaning behind it, he isn’t the head of a beach or anything, I just wanted a Welsh surname and that’s the first one that occurred to me. Another character is a young girl, Imogen Love – again, just because I like the name “Imogen”,  and Love is a cool surname which completely contrasts with her family life.

There isn’t actually anyone with an out-there name, I don’t think – my characters this time have names like Charles, Ella, David, Bryce, Aaron, Joe, Harry etc compared to when it used to be ridiculous names I couldn’t even pronounce, because I set so much store by the meaning of it. Obviously I try not to pick names with stupid meanings that make the name ridiculous, but for many of them, I haven’t actually looked at what their names mean – obviously Lilly is after a flower, and I think Adam is Biblical, but Daeron is completely made up and I haven’t the foggiest about the rest of them, and the meanings had no influence on what I chose.

I hope that’s a sign that my writing skills are improving and maturing, because I want to focus on making a more natural, believable story than one where I’ve picked names I’m really pleased with, but possibly to the detriment of the story itself!

However, if you do want to pick names with a meaning, a website I’ve found to be absolutely invaluable is behindthename – http://www.behindthename.com – because you can search for names by meaning or words in the description, and you can also search by language and origin. I don’t want it to come across that I’m saying picking names with a meaning is wrong all the time, but the way I did it was very wrong – even if the name didn’t suit the character at all, I’d pick it because I liked the meaning, which made the stories quite bad to write because I didn’t like writing about the characters.