2.26.2008

What's In a Name?

Let's be frank. Names are ridiculously important, and they are a big issue for me and Alz. If you ever have the (mis)fortune to peek in on one of our brainstorming sessions--whether it be for our joint work or individual work--you'll see how much we trip and stumble. Indeed, the list of "Project ____" names that Alz posted a few posts back should be indicative of this.

For this collaboration, we just went for the hit or miss style of naming people. We tended to do very quick character sketches before attempting to find a name for said characters. Interestingly enough, the method we've been using the most is "So what letters don't you use a lot?" and then we instant message names starting with whatever less-used letter we've settled upon. (Let me tell you, names beginning with U and Q prove to be difficult.) Surprisingly, this method has worked well for this unnamed novel.

We take other factors into consideration as well, such as the sound and spelling of the name in relation to how we think a character is or what a place ought to be like. We also like looking up name meanings or using root words and translating them into another language. I'm especially into names with meanings because I think it adds another layer to characters. It's like randomly clicking around on a DVD menu and finding a hidden Easter Egg.



The most important thing is, of course, "fit." The name and the character have to click. This part is more on the subjective side of things and is too hard to explain since it's more of a feeling than anything else, but I still find it of utmost importance. A name can be hilarious or beautiful or incredibly clever, but if it doesn't somehow capture the character--if it's not "right"--it's all for naught. Names are, after all, an integral part of identity. It's a word (or maybe a handful of words depending) that identifies a person to him/herself and to the rest of his/her society, making it powerful.

We see this for ourselves in our literature and culture. In folklore and fantasy, there's the idea of the true name, in which the knowledge of names is power and in which names are thought to reflect some true aspect of the thing being named. In a similar vein, an article published in Psychology Today a long while back interviewed people who had changed their names, and these people said they'd done it because they were unhappy with their given names, that those old names did not reflect who they really were. Naming practices reflect the belief that names can help shape a person's character/personality and/or guide their destinies. Just look at all the baby name books out there! Chinese names are written and spoken with the surname first, expressing a cultural emphasis on the importance of the family and one's place in a family group. And finally, my specific literature example is from the play The Crucible by Arthur Miller. At the end of the play, John Proctor cannot bring himself to sign a false confession and says
"Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!"
showing what a name represents and its importance to his personal and moral integrity.

I thought this would be an interesting topic on its own, but also because in our current story, Alz and I have found ourselves with more than one character who dislikes their name or at least goes by something other than their given name (i.e. a nickname). This is abnormal, at least for me because I don't often have characters who go by nicknames. Although, I do touch on the "true name" idea passingly sometimes.

So what are some of your favorite names for anyone, real or fictional? How do other people go about naming the Proper Nouns populating their stories? And to reiterate, what's in a name?

P.S. A fun fact related to all this is how Val was named. (I know, I already mentioned him. I can't help picking on the poor dear.) We used our original method of just throwing out names and even looked a few up, but nothing seemed to stick. Then finally, Alz said, "Happy Valentine's Day!"--(and it literally was)--"VALENTINE. HIS NAME SHOULD BE VALENTINE." To which the conversation continued as follows:

K: I guess...we could call him Val and then he can be really embarrassed about it later.
A: I don't know. I just thought, you know, it might be a sign.

We didn't actually name him Valentine, but it's something else, and it's still shortened to Val.

2.24.2008

The Birth of Suilong

Krispy and I decided that we needed another cosmic serpent (who doesn't?) and so we decided that we'd rather create one than steal borrow one from an existing mythology. Then we decided that we should have this cosmic serpent be the Asian-inspired one we'd talked about before, and therefore being Asiatic, this cosmic serpent needed an appropriately Asiany name, as I continue to abuse and create various Asian-related adjectives.

We'd talked before about Japanese/Chinese/Asian names and words, including hebi (Japanese word for "snake") and nure (what Alz believes might be a possible alternate reading of the kanji for "snake" in Japanese, but isn't sure) and various other Japanese and non-Japanese names and words, which lead to a discussion of how sucky it would be for said snaky to be a snake named rabbit (Japanese, "Usagi"), a snake named lion (Arabic, "Usama"), or a snake named bear ("Ursus", Latin). I also suggested the combo name of Usaginure ("Rabbitsnake"), but we eventually got distracted and moved on, never deciding on a name for our new serpent.

Last night we once again turned to the name problem.



Says the Alz, "What's the Chinese word for dragon?"

To which replies the Krispy, "Well, dragon is Long."

Says the Alz, "What about the Chinese word for snake?"

To which replies the Krispy, "The word for snake sounds like you're saying 'uh' but with an S in front and the tone goes upward at the end."

What followed was Alz trying out various combinations of potential spellings in order to mentally sound out this word (remember, this was all text via instant messaging): Su, sa, si, sui? And since sui means "water" in Japanese, we decided to randomly moosh languages together to create a semi-bastardized Asianish name for our newly-designated water-elemental cosmic serpent. We did go through a number of variations concerning punctuation, including Sui-Long, Sui Long, and Sui'long, and I since I had come up with the name, I got to force Krispy to decide on the spelling of it. Reasoning that the apostrophe looks a bit weird in the name and apostrophes in names is off-putting to many people (yours truly often included), she settled on Suilong.

After a bit more discussion concerning a rather nebulous previously-envisioned-but-still-unnamed cosmic serpent, we decided the color scheme of the previous nebulous cosmic serpent we'd envisioned wouldn't match Suilong because the previous serpent is bony-white and spiky. This wouldn't really suit a water-themed snake, we thought, and so we went all out on Suilong, whom we also decided is female because we have too many males running around.

She can fly without wings à la Asian dragons, we decided, and Suilong is seriously deadly lethally viciously venomous. Her venom eats through glass. It'd probably kill you just from a drop touching your skin, never mind getting injected into your body. Or at least that's what I so far imagine.

But what color to make her? Blue? White? Blue and white? We already have cosmic serpents that are on the white/silvery color scheme, so Suilong ought to be different. And then Krispy said, Omg maybe she should be gold, and Alz said, Ooooho I like gold it's shiny omg like a goldfish?

We talked about koi fish, being tricolor with black and white and gold/orange/red, and the beautiful shiny gold of goldfish scales, and Krispy suggested gold with red markings around her eyes, with an orange fin running along her spine. For a while we mused on eye color, because while I thought blue would make a nice contrast in all her gold and red glory, the aforementioned other cosmic serpents already have blue eyes. We talked about her having dark eyes or golden eyes or dark golden eyes like various kinds of fish. Red we discounted because her eye markings are already red, and when I suggested creepy pearly white eyes, Krispy said it was too creepy and too much like a cooked fish. With that image in mind, I was inclined to agree.

Finally I suggested dark red eyes, midnight-red, while Krispy suggested copperishly colored eyes like a shiny penny. Now, I happen to be very partial to shiny things (this may have been evident earlier when talking about making Suilong gold), and when Krispy threw the choice on me because she'd decided on Suilong's name format, I chose coppery eyes for our water snaky. More contrast against the red and gold, I said.

Krispy is supposed to draw our new cosmic serpent, by the way. That's right, Krispy, I'm putting this in the blog. DRAW SUILONG. And in color would be nice too. ♥

We also plugged along further plot-wise last night, found Suilong a nice place in the story to settle in, did a little chronological rearranging of points, added to and clarified some scenes, started a new scene, and worked out some "research" for our researchers to, well, research. Things are coming along nicely—our baby is developing steadily and well. I'm so proud.

2.22.2008

Noteworthy developmental notes of development

So I suppose I ought to make a post of some kind, to make my mark upon this blog and also to hold true to the mission statement our dear Krispy has outlined below. If this blog is to be a bastion of evolutionary recollection, then we'd damn well better hop to it like bunnies on crack and get some recording down and done.

Every day has so far seen progress of some kind, be it the technical details of giving characters names and backgrounds or be it meandering along with motives and plot. Last night in particular we hacked our way through a couple of scenes, came up with a few more characters, and finally had main characters meet each other. Most of this consisted of us going, "OMG and then he ought to do this, don't you think?" and "omg YESSSS okay okay and that's because of what happened earlier, right?", followed by one of us going, "LOL yeah", and ultimately culminating in something akin to a little thing we like to call "plot".

Most of our progress takes this form via instant messaging. But this just goes to show that we are so awesome we cannot be stopped. Yes, that is a great big fat ball-and-chain of hubris I'm lugging around, but like our characters, everyone needs a "human" moment, their flaws, their quirks. Even when not all of them are exactly human.

Incidentally, just for kicks, I've decided to list the names we were coming up with when we were trying to figure out what our mysterious researchers would name their project. The abandoned list includes:

Project FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
Project Ambrosia
Project Nectar
Project 42
Project Peach
Project Gnosis

There were a couple more, but those are the more interesting ones. In the end, we decided that the project name should be Project Apple--which was, actually, the second name Krispy suggested after Project FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE, which we regretfully decided was a little too obvious a name. Alas.

2.18.2008

We have to start somewhere

Welcome to A Nudge in the Right Direction, which is an attempt at documenting our journey into the realm of collaborative novel writing. This will inevitably include much insanity because both Alz and I are known to be a little bit spastic, and also, we're new at this (sort of)!

With this blog, the hope is that in self-reflection and conscious pondering, our collective efforts will be all the more educational. We expect musings on character development and world building, the testing of brainstorming techniques, recordings of the trials and tribulations of working together, and the basic mumblings about honing the craft. And in any case even if none of the aforementioned come to pass, it would be nice to have something to click back to in the future to see the strange (or not so strange) things we did in the raising of our metaphorical baby.

As for the title of the blog itself, it could be interpreted to have layers of hidden meaning, but mostly, it's just an inside joke in reference to one of our new characters, Val. Clearly, Val is for us as he is for his character-associates in this new novel a nudge in the right direction.

2.01.2008

ABOUT

The Scribblers

KRISPY is a sporadic and erratic scribbler of thoughts, plots, and sometimes stories. At least part of this has to do with the vast amounts of caffeine and sugar she consumes. She is an introverted extrovert (or perhaps the flip), who currently resides in the space between wakefulness and sleep.


ALZ, says Krispy, is a veritable Wort Ungeheuer (word monster), who crunches out wordage the way a chocoholic in withdrawal hacks through a box of king-sized Crunch bars. Otherwise, Alz is a slacker of grandiose projects multitudinous that have, so far, yet to see either completion or even the light of day, though the dark of night is more likely considering her nocturnal habits.


You may CONTACT us at nudging.along[at]gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you.


The Blog

Welcome to A Nudge in the Right Direction, which is an attempt at documenting our journey into the realm of collaborative novel writing. This will inevitably include much insanity because both Alz and I are known to be a little bit spastic, and also, we're new at this (sort of)!

With this blog, the hope is that in self-reflection and conscious pondering, our collective efforts will be all the more educational. We expect musings on character development and world building, the testing of brainstorming techniques, recordings of the trials and tribulations of working together, and the basic mumblings about honing the craft. And in any case even if none of the aforementioned come to pass, it would be nice to have something to click back to in the future to see the strange (or not so strange) things we did in the raising of our metaphorical baby.

As for the title of the blog itself, it could be interpreted to have layers of hidden meaning, but mostly, it's just an inside joke in reference to one of our new characters, Val. Clearly, Val is for us as he is for his character-associates in this new novel a nudge in the right direction.