Tag: editing

What’s in a Name?

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Today’s blog post comes from us courtesy of Roxanne St. Claire (@roxannestclaire), a fellow Twitterling (I’m not sure if that’s something we call people on Twitter, but I like the term, and thus it is what I call people on Twitter all the same.

In under 140 characters Roxanne wrote:

“Sometimes just changing a character’s name changes everything. Just did that and heroine feels so much more “right” now.”

Right away, at least for me, that made complete sense. There are some writers out there who can write an entire story with their characters being X and Y before filling in the names. I, personally, can’t. A name means a lot to my characters. Often times, a story idea comes from the name, rather than fitting the name into a completed story. I don’t know, maybe that comes from my not much caring for outlines, but all the same.

Take, for example, Willow. One of the main characters in my novel Grey Areas. To me, she has always been Willow. I’m not quite sure where the name came from at the time (perhaps it’s just that I like plant names. Thinking about it, the Main Character in The Bleeding Crowd is Dahlia…) but from the moment I started writing, she was Willow. From that name, an entire back story came out that her parents had been hippies. Hence the plant names. (And the fact that her middle name became Belladonna). For The Bleeding Crowd, the names are even more set. Dahlia comes from a mother who loves plant names. The twins are Audrey and Zoe (A and Z for the two ends of the alphabet). All the men have biblical names (Benjamin, Jude, Abraham…)

But, ok, those all have plot reasons behind them. It would be a little odd to have all characters in X group have names that start with one letter and stray from that. In those cases, of course names matter. But what about just any old character? Does it really matter if a character is named Jill or Jane?

Of course, to quote Shakespeare, “That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet” (Romeo and Juliet (II, ii)). Would it really have mattered to the story if Romeo had been named Sam? Or Bill?

Perhaps not. If you wrote the characters exactly the same, perhaps it wouldn’t matter if the play were “Bill and Juliet” but then, the name Bill just brings up a different connotation there, doesn’t it? The 1989 movie Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure just wouldn’t have sounds the same if it had been “William and Theodore’s Excellent Adventure” now would it?

To quote the great philosophers, the writers of The Simpsons:

Lisa – “A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet.”
Bart – “Not if they were called ‘Stink Blossoms’.”

Perhaps a rose would still smell like a rose even if it were called something else. But what would someone’s first reaction be if you were trying to give them a Stink Blossom for Valentine’s Day? I doubt many people would want to even try smelling something that says it stinks in the name. And for those who did, you can’t discount the idea of the mind playing tricks. Something along the lines of the placebo effect. You tell someone something’s going to smell bad, less likely they’re going to accept that it smells good.

Personally, I think the same thing happens to a lot of writers. There’s a picture in our heads associated with names. Take Agnes for example. What’s the first thing you picture? Unless you know someone else named Agnes, it’s probably an older woman. Now Laquisha, or Vinnie. There are some names that are just associated with stereotypes – either because they are most common in one group than another, it’s a name used a lot in media referring to one type of person, or because they have been used as a negative “catch-all” for a group of people (such as someone insultingly referring to a hispanic man as ‘Jose’). There’s such a strong mental connection to some names that it doesn’t only affect how a reader sees the character, but it starts morphing even us writers’ ideas about our characters.

And, so were’ back to Roxanne’s point, “Changing a character’s name changes everything.” It’s probably why it can take so long to find a perfect name for one character, and why you couldn’t change another’s name no matter how much a publisher or agent pushes you to. It’s just the character’s name. It’s how you see them. It’s who they grow to be.

And so, a rose might still smell like a rose, but it wouldn’t be what we expect it to be. And that changes everything.

(If you’re struggling to name someone or something in your story, naming sites around the web can help you find something that seems to “fit.” I made a handy list of a small fraction of these sites available here to help point anyone looking in the right direction.)

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Beginning Writer Problems

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Publishing Update: The contract for my new novel, The Bleeding Crowd, has been signed. Look for more updates as its August release date gets closer.

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As a freelance editor, I spend a good amount of time with other people’s not-quite finished masterpieces. Though I have edited for all manner of writers (from the first-time novelist to multiply-published) my three most recent jobs have been for either completely new novelists, or ones with only a little experience under their belts.

None have been especially bad (there are some novels I have gotten freelance which, I admit, have made me cringe) but I have seen some problems that seem to be a common theme. For all those aspiring novelists out there, here are a few things I’d suggest keeping an eye on.

1. “Very” abuse. I can understand it, the music at the club your characters have gone to isn’t just loud. Having gone to clubs, I know the particular level of loud club music is. “The music was very loud” is a “very” weak sentence though. Not only because of the “to be” verb (was) but because “very”, for the most part, just clutters up a sentence. There are such stronger words to use. “The music was deafening” or “my/his/her ears rang, the music shaking the walls” are both stronger (and more interesting).

2. Contractions. People speak with contractions. One of the easiest ways to make someone sounds stuffy/formal/like a non-native English speaker is to have them speak without contractions. Think about the people you talk to on a regular basis. Now think about which of these sounds more like what they would say: a) “I am going to go. He cannot now, so he will come when he is able.”  of b) “I’m going to go. He can’t now, so he’ll come when he’s able.”

3. If people are saying things, use dialogue. As with all of these suggestions, there are exceptions, but dialogue is one of the easiest ways to make your writing quick and engaging. Of course it has to be good dialogue, but even bad dialogue tends to be more interesting than, “he was telling me/him/her about this, and this, and this.”

4. You don’t need to account for every minute. It’s possible to skip time/stop when the interesting part of the scene is done. If you start every scene by a character waking up and end with them going to sleep (and it isn’t a conscious stylistic choice) take a closer look at the scene. Do you really just need the two main characters to meet? You can have “they looked at each other in the coffee shop” as the first line of the scene. It doesn’t have to be “she woke up, took a shower, thought about having breakfast, but then decided to just get a bagel at the coffee shop on the corner.” If it isn’t important/interesting, you can skip to the fun parts.

5. “To Be” verbs. I touched on this a bit before, but “to be” verbs (am, is, was, were…) are weak. Don’t worry about taking out every “to be” verb in your writing, but if it doesn’t need to be there, don’t use it. For example, it doesn’t have to be “The ball was falling.” “The ball fell” is better.

6. Adverbs. I’m hardly one of those editors who is against adverbs of any kind. If you’ve read any of my writing, you know I’m not against adverbs. Just like “very” abuse, the main problems with abusing adverbs is that often they’re used when a stronger word could be. It’s especially bad when coupled with “very” abuse. “He said very quietly.” What’s wrong with “He whispered.”? If you can say something in fewer words, it’s generally stronger.

7. Telling, not showing. Yeah, this saying is overused quite a big, but it does has its uses. It’s just not interesting reading “He was angry.” How is “he” feeling? Or if he isn’t the narrator, how does the narrator see “he” is mad? Is his pulse rising? Is his face turning red? Is he clenching his fists?

8. Vary sentence structure. If every sentence starts with the same word (generally “I” in first person or “He/She/[Character’s Name]” in third person, try to change up some sentences. Not everything has to be filtered though a character (to use an above example, it doesn’t have to be “I/He/She/[Character Name] saw the ball fall” it can just be “The ball fell.”) It’s also possible to change up complex sentences (“She started to walk down the dark street, her foot steps echoing on the walls.” can become “Her foot steps echoed on the wall as she…”)

9. Switching tenses. Something to just watch for, I see it far too often. You can write in present or past tense (there are plenty of debates over which is better, and past is more common, but it’s your choice). Just keep consistent. Few things seem more awkward than when you start a sentence in past tense and finish it in present.

As with anything else in creative writing, take what I say with a grain of salt. There’s a time and place for almost everything. It’s when you do things without thinking, without a reason for them, that it makes someone seem like a novice. All of the above are little things, easily correctable (I’m sure I did more than one of them when I was just starting to write). Writing, like anything else, is a skill. If it isn’t perfect to start, just keep practicing.

Even if something is the best thing you’ve ever written, it only is because you haven’t had the chance to write something even better.

That’s Just…Wrong

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In my last post, I wrote about my own take on the old writer adage “Write What You Know”. When you take it with a grain of salt, I agree, it’s a good thing to do. But, of course, there are always things you can’t know. And, there are things you don’t even think about possibly being wrong, just because we’ve read and seen too many things that tell us that the wrong things are true.

So, for this blog, I will make it my mission to correct at least some of these unknown mistakes that won’t seem to die in fiction. (If you feel I’ve missed an important one, feel free to add it in the comments or message me and I’ll add it.)

1. If you’re knocked out for more than a minute, it’s very possible you will have brain damage. Despite what you’ve seen and read time and time again, if you are hit over the head and are knocked out long enough to be moved to an entirely new location (generally by the bad guys) you aren’t going to wake up a little dazed and then be walking around a few seconds later. It’s hard to get knocked out for a reason. If every bump on the head took you out for 10 or more minutes, many more humans would have been eaten by lions back in yonder-times.

2. Gold bars are HEAVY. Ever dream of breaking into Fort Knox (or the New York Federal Reserve if you want to be different) throwing a bunch of gold into a duffel and heading out rich? It’s a great “bank heist” standard after all. Yeah, gold is dense. The men who move gold bars around wear special toe protectors to make sure their feet aren’t crushed by a dropped bar, and each bar is something like 20 pounds. By all accounts, those 20 pounds being contained in such a small object makes each one feel more like 50 (sadly, I’ve never gotten to hold one to see…) Stick a bunch in a duffel bag and you’re either not going to be able to lift it, or the fabric’s going to tear before you get it out of the room.

3. The Middle Ages lasted for 10 centuries. Look it up, from about 400 A.D. to 1400 A.D. Fashion changed in that millennium. A lot changed in that millennium. If you’re doing a historical fiction (or a time travel fantasy, or…) it’s easy to fall into historical inaccuracies by grouping it together as one cohesive time.

4. “Blowing up” a picture doesn’t make it clearer. There’s only so many pixels in a camera picture. At some point, zooming in is going to just make the picture blurry (try it yourself. Find a small picture and start zooming in, or stretching it, on your computer. It will get bigger, but not get clearer).

5. Defibrillation doesn’t bring people back to life. The electric jolt “shock paddles” give actually are made to stop the heart for a split second so that the heart will “restart” with a regular beat. If the heart’s already not beating, it can’t help.

6. Potatoes aren’t native to Ireland. One that’s more important, again, for historical/time travel fiction, even though they are associated with Ireland these days (what with the Potato Famine and all) potatoes did not exist in Europe (the “old world”) prior to the Columbian Exchange.

7. Cars don’t explode. If you watch Mythbusters, you probably already know this, but cars don’t tend to explode (or catch on fire) when they crash. Not unless explosives have been set inside them. Yes, gas is flammable, but car manufacturers are careful about those things. They don’t want to, you know, kill their customers.

8. Sounds doesn’t travel in space. Without any matter (air) to move through, the sound waves aren’t going to travel. Doesn’t matter if it’s a giant explosion or someone talking, there’s some finagling you’ll have to do in your sci fi for that to work.

9. Just because you aren’t in the fire/explosion/lava doesn’t mean you can’t get burned. Heat travels away from things that cause heat. It’s why, even if you aren’t touching the flame, holding your finger over a candle will still end up with you getting burned. Standing next to hot lava will, likewise, burn you.

10. Elevators doors won’t open onto empty shafts. As a safety mechanism, the part of the elevator that opens the doors is on the car. If the elevator is not at the floor, the doors aren’t going to slide open (at least for newer models, I’m not sure about older ones if someone wants to look into that.) It is, however, possible to get stuck in an elevator. I speak from experience there…

Hopefully those will help writers with any plot holes, and–like I said–if you think I’m missing something important, contact me or add it yourself in the comments. Happy writing.

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