Writer's Block Daily

Where did you find that name?

Names in my story are...Yeshovah, Yessamine, Pieter, Duniya, Darien, Iria, Tanisha, Surkha, Allessan, Stanivan, Tohmir, Mekish, Rillka and some more. Some of them belong to the same people.

Hmm. Character names, huh?

In Of Blades, the main characters are Kristina Kazue Hisui Rainer, Takaki Yukiko (who is a guy, despite the name), Piter (just Piter) and Amanda "Mandy" Anders.

In Five Lessons, the main characters are Steele (no given name decided on yet, though I'm tending towards Daniel), Naomi, Gabriel, Janet and Turtle and Firefly, who don't yet have legal names, but I should probably decide on them soon.

I was trying to find a name with a particular meaning to it and a friend suggested it. It's not exactly the meaning, but it's close enough. This was back before I found behindthenames. Not that that would help, it's not actually on there?

But yeah I've found that there's actually two different meanings for it, but no pronunciation guide yet. And yes, there's an in story explanation for the parents giving her such an obscure name.

I hate having writer's block.

Well we hate you too!

I end up with a lot of female names ending in "-ine." Caroline, Nadine, Ondine, Jacqueline... there are probably others. Not sure why.

edited 28th Mar '13 9:54:41 PM by JHM

As my story takes place in a future world and puts emphasis on culture being quite different from turn-of-the-milennium America, I've been at some pains to come up with names that sound just a slight bit alien. My protagonist, who's a Fish out of Temporal Water of sorts, is named Nicole Andrews (it's a Meaningful Name that means, roughly, "victory of the people through humanity"), but as for the rest...there's Maria, Lana, Julian, Alexander, Akio, and someone I'm still trying to come up with a good name for.

That said, some of the most fun I've ever had as an author is the time I wrote a short story and decided to just go nuts with character naming. The setting was deliberately ambiguous, so I ransacked all sorts of naming websites for names with all kinds of different origins, the more outlandish, the better.

Thus it was that I ended up with Mayor Papageorgiou and his valet, Damirchizadeh. They were the rulers of a Thirty Xanatos Pileup, and it was good.

I'm at about 38k right now.

This is so hard.

There were three different Alexanders in my seventh-grade algebra class. "A slight bit alien" is not the phrasing I'd use.

Also, good heavens do I omniloathe the Mary Sue culture.

That's some ambiguous phrasing. Could refer to either "the culture of people who go about labeling characters 'Mary Sues' without constructive intent" or "obnoxiously perfect fictional cultures". Although I agree either way, clarification seems advisable.

edited 29th Mar '13 7:47:00 PM by KillerClowns

Publishing industry news: Amazon has bought Goodreads.

This article is just one viewpoint, but there's plenty of opinions on the matter.

This one, although it goes further what you describe.

x10 Michmethah

Ooh, sweet! Thanks!

Or even the culture that causes people to write Sues.

edited 30th Mar '13 8:13:39 AM by Night

Whee, accidental double post due to edit attempt, IGNORE ME

edited 30th Mar '13 8:13:13 AM by Night

How important is it to mention a character's race in a novel? :/

Depends on how important it is to you that a large portion of the audience doesn't default to white (or reading it as another race I guess, but those are usually individualised rather than a cultural trend). If representation and the like are important to you, probably better to make it explicit.

One thing I've seen is that if you mention the race of one character, you should mention the race of the other characters. Because if you mention, for example, that a character is African American but don't for anyone else, it comes off as assuming everyone is white unless otherwise mentioned.

It also depends on the the setting of the story. In a story taking place in, say, the United States, mentioning it becomes important. If it takes place in an ethnically far more homogenous place, such as modern day Japan, you really only need to mention people who are not the overwhelmingly dominant ethnicity in the region.

I don't know. I guess it was kind of surprising in my drawings when Dawn was black, but I mean. She lives on a moonbase that controls a deathlaser and was essentially assembled by her father out of a box of genetic scraps. She's not genetically related to anyone we know — as far as we know, the only thing this means is that there were probably black people on the moon at some point of time.

So I mean it's like she's black but she's so isolated that it doesn't matter?

What does "heavily inspired" actually mean? What's the line between "heavily inspired" and "rip-off?"

edited 31st Mar '13 5:40:02 AM by MorwenEdhelwen

The difference between "heavily inspired" and "rip-off" is how well written the piece is

^ And here I thought "heavily inspired" meant so similar to another work but doesn't actually mention or name anything after the other. "Rip off" is so similar that it outright names or hints that the names of things are the same to the other work.

Well, no. I mean the thing is that ideas are cheap, so using someone else's ideas is not really that big a deal. It depends on the writing. If the writing is good enough that the work is good on its own, then it's "heavily inspired." If the writer just seems to be using things from someone else because they like them, or the ideas were popular at the time, and there's none of that je ne sais quoi to it that makes it good, then it's a "rip off".