Kia ora, actually William, there’s a hell of a lot in a name. Especially for fictional characters. At least for me. I don’t know if Shakespeare had the same difficulty but I’ve been searching for a name for my lead character in No Good Crying (the e-novel I started writing a few weeks ago) for ages.
No Good Crying is the third in the Vogel Place trilogy and just like the two before it and in fact, anything fictional I’ve ever written, I’m having great trouble with the name of the main character. I had the same problem with Hester (Too Many Cooks) and Harriet (Once Bitten). I mucked around for weeks, tried out all sorts of possibilities, until I found the right one
Before I started searching the only thing I knew about the name of this current one was that it would not start with an H.
Names matter a lot to me. It irritates me that after weeks of thought and searching through names on the internet I keep coming back to a name I’ve used before for a character in a play so have a reluctance to use it again. There are millions of names out there and I have to settle on one I’ve used before?
The thing is – and I won’t be the only writer this happens to – once I get the name right the character will live. I know when its right. But I still hesitated.
Then Jamie Bull showed me this beautiful photo of an iris (grown from a corm I gave her) and when she showed me I though okay, I give up. An Iris, is an Iris, is an Iris. Renée…
