The War of Memory Project

Question 77 – How do you choose character names?

Starting in middle school, I kept a list of interesting-sounding names that I either thought up randomly or found elsewhere, and would tweak them until they became something that fit a character.  As I built my story-world more, though, I started reverse-deriving some of the names to build the vocabulary in my fake language, and then branched out to defining naming-conventions for the various kingdoms and territories.  So these days, I check the naming conventions first, and then the language dictionary, and tack something together from those — but most of my long-running characters have names from before that age, so might stand out a bit from the rest of the pack, who knows.

To add to this, the divergence between my old names, the reverse-derivations, and the naming conventions has given me some interesting wiggle-room in which to feign bad translations and regional variants.  The main culture I work with is Imperial, which — being an empire — tends to translate words and names that don’t sound ‘right’ in foreign languages into something that sounds properly Imperial.  There are a lot of foreign-born characters stuck in the Empire whose names have been Imperialized, but as they shake off these shackles, some of them start ditching the Imperial versions themselves for the originals.

Examples: Weshker — Vesha Geiri
Cobrin — Ko Vrin
Jessamyn — Yesai Miun

There are also some place-names that the Imperial tongue mangles, like Padras for Pajhrastha, or Kerrindryr for Kirin Diur.

More: Authors Answer 77 – Naming Characters

Due to the magic of computers, I still have a few 20-year-old story files, which I glanced over for the purpose of this question.  I should probably dig into my physical notebooks again some time, since that’s where I kept all the world information and some of the story origins and rewrites I was working on during high school.  There’s a bit of concept art in those that I should probably scan.

Question 76 – When you look at your oldest writing, what surprises or embarrasses you?

My oldest surviving writing is from when I was about twelve, and was edited when I was about fifteen, so I’m surprised to see that even then I had an attachment to certain concepts and character-types, even if almost none of the specifics of those characters have survived. I wouldn’t really say I’m embarrassed, because my prose wasn’t too bad then, for what I was writing — Dungeons & Dragons-style adventures.  I’m much more embarrassed of the literary short stories I slapped together during college, since I wasn’t allowed to write genre fiction in my short-story classes; the disinterest really shows.

Probably what amuses me most about this early, early writing, is that Lark and Rian are featured in it — as a ranger (or a rogue? not sure) and a standard D&D elf.  That ‘Rian’ character eventually became Ilshenrir, but he took more than a decade and many iterations to get there, and the name now belongs to a goblin.

Aaaand looking at the files now, it seems the earliest stuff was actually written when I was ten and rewritten at thirteen, not twelve and fifteen.  Wow.  There’s only about five pages of each — not sure if I lost material somewhere or if that was all I ever typed out of it.

More: Authors Answer 76 – Authors Reflecting on Their Earliest Writing