Voice of the Phoenix Blog » Character

NaNoWriMo: Fruits of My Labor

emmephoenix — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 21:52:34 +0000

Today I was privileged to have the opportunity to experience a special kind of reward for participating in NaNoWriMo: at the invitation of Chris Evans, I read an excerpt from Chapter 14 of the first novel of my Bent Parallels Quintology on UVM station WRUV this morning at 10. Aaron Smith, another Verimo, was the other guest and read the beginning of his novel, tantalizingly named The Water Beggars’ Tune.

Bios are here posted on Chris’s blog Writers@WRUV, and tomorrow, Chris will be posting the excerpts and an MP3 of the show, in case you missed it.

One of the interesting elements for me was how much editing I was led to do in the course of preparing simply from the experience of reading aloud. The excerpt I sent to Chris on Monday at his request (to give him an idea of what was coming and allow him to vet it for possible FCC violations) was not—and I cleared this with Chris ahead of time—not exactly the same as what I read on the air.

Because a high percentage of the excerpt is dialogue between two characters, reading the piece was—in effect—acting it out and allowed me to test the veracity of the characterization: did it hold up to scrutiny? My answer when I first read it was, “not yet.”

I changed words to synonyms that flowed more trippingly off the tongue in the particular context; rearranged sentence parts; changed the order of the first several paragraphs to make the “argument” of the section progress more persuasively; added a puzzled interjection from one of the characters at a point where she had earlier said nothing; and repeated one particular word to make a stronger connection between sections.

I’d like to thank Chris again for the opportunity: it was great fun!

NaNoWriMo: Valuable Sources for Character Names

emmephoenix — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:57:35 +0000

I ran across some useful sources for character names today that I’d like to share.

• Native American names at Writing Adolescent Fiction/Character Names/Native American but be sure to carefully distinguish tribe-appropriate names.

• Wikipedia Category: Surnames a listing of a large number of surnames that can be searched by the first two letters

• White Pages.com, a place where you can see the distribution of a surname across the United States and also find out how popular it is

• Baby Name Data from the Social Security Administration, in case you have a question like: what boys names were popular in the U.S. in the 1890s? Data is available by decade and state, and you can also find popular names for twins.

• Baby Names World, a particularly useful name site because besides searching by name, you can search by a set of letters that appear at the start, end, or anywhere in the name.

Building Character 2

emmephoenix — Wed, 27 May 2009 13:39:52 +0000

We call it waiting because we don’t find it valuable in and of itself (if we did, we’d assign a different name): it’s time that doesn’t have its own meaning—a holding place until the real event starts.
These days it’s often possible to avoid waiting—we carry cell phones and lap tops and PDAs to chase the waiting time away or turn it into time with a purpose. But there can still be odd moments when we’re unprepared for the wait, or get bored with or need a break from whatever we brought along to do.
Last week I had an unexpected wait when someone had to excuse himself temporarily from a meeting. After wearing out the other options, I took a look in the magazine rack. Among magazines featuring recipes and decorating ideas, I didn’t expect much of real interest or use. But I got a surprise.

At the bottom of the rack, a good bit below eye level, was a March, 2008 issue of the magazine Natural History, a magazine I’d never even seen before.The cover caption? “Samurai Shrew,” and the related article contained a description of the characteristics and attributes of shrews, in particular the North American water shrew, by shrew expert Kenneth C. Catania: “No Taming the Shrew,” also available online.
Now, it’s not that shrews per se are of general or intrinsic interest. It’s the fact that articles like these focus on unique and, often, recently discovered features of the animal that leads me to recommend them. When you’re trying to develop characters with interesting and unusual traits, to find an example of characteristics that are not only not typical characteristics of people but are rare and distinctive even among animals might help you get beyond the tall/short, fat/thin, smart/unintelligent, brave/cowardly, etc. character. Or if not you, perhaps students in a writing course you teach.
What these shrews can do is something that doesn’t even seem physically possible: they can smell their prey underwater. Since there isn’t air underwater, it’s initially difficult to understand how this could be. It turns out that the shrews exhale air bubbles onto whatever they’re investigating and are able to re-inhale the air to identify prey. It happens so fast that it took slowed-motion on high-speed cameras to make the process observable. Moreover, an amazingly large percentage of the water shrew’s brain power is given to processing sensory data from its whiskers, giving the shrew a multi-faceted approach to scoping out prey.
Not a bad springboard for brainstorming some new traits for a human or non-human character. And that’s only one of the stories in the magazine . . .

Building Character

emmephoenix — Wed, 27 May 2009 13:11:40 +0000

Authors of fiction start their creative process in various ways. Some tout character, some setting, some plot, as the jumping off point for their writing.
In this regard, I suppose that I am of the “eclectic” school, because my creations grow from different starting points at different times.
And inspiration comes from a variety of sources.

I recently came across a website designed to assist in character creation, particularly in the fantasy genre, Seventh Sanctum™. The site has name generators for items from “Beings” and “Characters” to “Anime/Manga.” It also generates Equipment, Skills, Technology, and even story ideas.
It’s (obviously) formulaic, and has some spelling errors, and I personally wouldn’t use it for it’s pre-generated character ideas, though perhaps you might wish to see if it would be useful for your purposes.
But that’s not to say it isn’t useful.
First, it’s interesting to analyze the underlying structure. That is, what elements are considered as necessary to define, say, a Ninja?
• Character trait
• Gender
• Height
• Build
• Eye shape
• Eye color
• Hair color
• Hair style
• Outfits
• Preferred fighting technique
• Notable skill
• Magical power
This could form the basis of a brainstorming activity (either one’s own or for a class, if one teaches) to build up a catalog of characters (and, of course, you could use the characteristics of vampires, say, instead of ninjas).
Second, the part of the site that I do actually make (tongue-in-cheek) use of is the Magical Invocation Generator.
My sister and I often chat or email on and off through the day, and when it seems appropriate, invocations make their way into our conversation. We prefer the form
By The X of X!
I believe that my sister is generating one at a time and using whatever comes up the first time (thus creating humor by non sequitur), while I generate 15 at a time and keep looking till I find something apropos (thus creating humor by coincidence) or just outrageous.
It works for us, by the adroitness of Leisean!