Names

I read. I write. I spend hours a day thinking about reading and writing. I constantly try to analyze why I like certain books and movies, but I hate other ones, and especially so when other people either have an overlap of those two or have the complete opposite opinion. I spend time every single day writing fiction or writing about writing fiction, posting it here on this blog. I've written on numerous occasions about my love of character development, and how that affects the way I think and whether or not I enjoy certain things. When I write my own stories, I keep the number of characters low for the express purpose of being able to focus on each of them more intimately and fully, so that they can have the time and development they need to be, in my eyes, truly great and interesting characters.

So you'd think I'd be better at coming up with names for said characters.

I was actually going to write something different tonight. A fairly typical fantasy story, really, of the knight ascending the tower or excavating a series of dangerous caverns in order to face off mano-a-mano with the dragon, all so that he might rescue the princess and take her hand in marriage for his reward. The difference was it would have been from the dragon's point of view. Who knows, I may still write it one of these days.

The problem was that I was sitting here, staring at my blank document, trying to think of a name for the dragon. I went looking for name's of famous dragons in fiction, I spent some time looking up certain words in different languages that I thought might be relevant, and eventually I had lost track in my mind of how I had even wanted to write the story.

Unfortunately, this is something that happens to me fairly often. And those are the kinds of things that I do. I look up names in lists depending on what I'm writing and who I'm naming, I translate words into different languages, and sometimes I just grab whoever is closest to me or most accessible and ask them to give me a name, the first name that comes to mind. Sometimes that works. And sometimes it doesn't.

I have this gut feeling about names when I hear them. It's never really a maybe kind of thing. When I hear a name, it either works for what I want to write, or it doesn't. Sometimes I have to ask my friends to throw a dozen or more names at me, and sometimes the first thing they give me is perfect. Sometimes a name they give me sends my brain down a spiral that ends up on a different name entirely that is exactly what I'm looking for.

As you might imagine, it can be pretty frustrating. I can know a character's entire history, every part they're going to play, even the things I want them to say and how I want them to say them, entire personalities planned out in my head, but I just can't put a name to it.

Granted, I'm also the kind of person that will recognize a voice or a face, be able to relive entire conversations in my head, and still not be able to remember their names. So maybe that's part of the problem.