(I’m sharing my October pre-November NaNoWriMo pre-writing ritual process thingie. Why? Because a lot of people have asked me to post it again. And it’s that time of year and stuff.)
So far, we’ve brainstormed, and produced a sentence, a paragraph, and then a series of paragraphs about the length of a page. And now we’re going to set that all aside!
Today
Now, we’re going to work on characters. *more dramatic music* There’s no reason to approach it with dread, you know. Today, we’re mostly going to visualize.
If you’ve done the previous steps, then you know something already about the main character(s) in your story. You already have a sense about him, her, it, or them. This entry will assume that we’re talking about a humanoid, with the identification construct of a first and last name. Yup, today, we’re going to name the character.
Do you already have at least a partial name picked out for your main character? Then this day’s work will be easy. If not, never fear, there is help!
Help
I’ve read and absorbed a lot of NaNoWriMo-specific tips over the years, and one of my favorites comes from someone who was inspired by their junk email folder. Some spam that is sent to you has a randomly generated name attached to them. This unlikely source of inspiration made me laugh when I first read it. It’s partially why I’m loathe to delete some junk email during the rest of the year, I’ve seen some fairly neat and unique names in there.
Another tip I can give you is, of course, the random generator. Here are a few:
You get the idea. Go, click, name your character!
An Aside
One more tip, if you’re stressing about naming your main character(s) right now–if you do your writing on computer, there’s usually an option in any word processor to search for a specific word, and change that word according to your specifications. In essence, you could name your male main character “Bob”, with the intent of changing it later.
You may change your mind at any time about what his (her, etc) name is. You could be halfway through your novel and in the back of your mind, “Bob” is yelling, “HEY! I feel much more like a ‘Frank’ than a ‘Bob’!” At which point you’ll stop to look around you for a moment, shrug, and make the necessary change. If you like taking inspiration from real life, you can send “Bob” on a mission to change his name in the story, which will of course pad your word count, and also save you from having to backtrack into previous content and change his name yourself, hehe.
Tomorrow, we make a character sheet or two for your main characters. Have that name ready!
Probably related:
