Musings of a Chocoholic Romance Author: The Importance of Naming Characters

Sunday, January 07, 2007

The Importance of Naming Characters

I love to name my characters. I really do. I could spend hours browsing through my favorite baby naming website, looking for Just The Right Name. It's as important as bestowing the Right Name on your actual children. Characters who've been named wrong tend to get... well... poopish... about cooperating. At least, they do for me.

So, imagine my joy when my dear friend and crit partner, Shara Jones, gave me a link to a site she uses to learn more about the names she's chosen for her characters. Here's the link.

Heaven. I was in heaven. Spent quite a while running characters' names through, to see if they were spot on. GGG. And my name, my husband's name, and the names of my children. My sisters, my mother and father...

Very enlightening, entertaining, and more valid than not.

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Quotes About Writing

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word. ~Catherine Drinker Bowen

Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing. ~Melinda Haynes

My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly. ~John D. MacDonald

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else. ~Gloria Steinem

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. ~Thomas Mann

Easy reading is damned hard writing. ~Anonymous

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to. ~Somerset Maugham

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. ~E. L. Doctorow

The secret of becoming a writer is to write, write and keep on writing. ~Ken MacLeod\

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards. ~Robert A. Heinlein

Never throw up on an editor. ~Ellen Datlow

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write. ~Stephen King

There are no rules in writing. There are useful principles. Throw them away when they're not useful. But always know what you're throwing away. ~Will Shetterly

Books are never finished, They are merely abandoned. ~Oscar Wilde

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. ~Jack London

If you wait for inspiration, you're not a writer, but a waiter. ~Anonymous

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master. ~Ernest Hemingway

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing. ~Gene Wolfe