It's Entirely All in the Name. Everything. Seriously.

So my work on editing PRIMUS has come to a screeching halt of late, so much so that I should really update my May Project List to more accurately reflect my suddenly-changed priorities.

What caused this sudden change in priorities?

1. The realization that I really do have extremely limited time to write.
2. The realization that it’s currently May, and my self-set deadline for self-publishing my novella “The Hound of God” is in August.
3. Calculating what needs to still be accomplished on the novella from now until that August date, which is a lot: outlining, writing, editing, coordinating art, formatting, uploading, blurb creation, cover design, publication.

Good cripes.

Thus, PRIMUS editing was immediately halted, and hard work on the novella began. I managed to outline the entire thing (this is the first time I’ve so completely outlined a project, and boy, does it feel GOOD!) at 1848 words, and it was a huge relief to have it all laid out in logical and chronological order. As a bonus, outlining it made it clear that I’m only really missing two out of the five planned chapters, meaning I only have two chapters to write from scratch. The other three are already written and just need to be edited and tweaked a bit to fit this new overarching plot!

HOORAY!

But what does any of this have to do with names, exactly?

This contest.

I’m a member of the Queer Sci-Fi Discussion Group and it is, by far, my favorite Facebook group. It is chock-full of amazing people who are not only extremely knowledgeable about all things writing, reading, and SFF-related, but who are just about the most even-tempered people I’ve ever met out there on the interwebs. So when their flash fiction contest was announced, I knew I had to submit an entry, some how or another.

But what to write about?

Turns out my recently completed outline for the novella sparked the idea for my flash fiction entry. Writing the 300 word max entry was another matter, entirely, however, and I nearly had an aneurism trying to cram a comprehensible story into 300 words. But I eventually did it, and I’m so glad it’s over with now, lol.

Before I could write even one word of the 300, though, I needed characters to populate this idea. And to have characters, I needed names.

Names.

Oh boy.

This is when I realized how important character names are to me. I couldn’t write a single word of that flash fiction without having names. This happened in PRIMUS, too, even for minor characters. I couldn’t just write [insert name here] and keep writing to fill in the blank later. I HAD to have the name. Right then. Immediately. I had to stop everything and go find a good name.

Not just any name, mind you. A good one. A great one. The perfect name. Even for the minor characters. The perfect name.

And for the main characters of my flash fiction (or for any full length project), it’s absolutely imperative the names are perfect.

What is my definition of “perfect”, then? Well, I don’t know. It’s different for every story. It depends on what kind of story it is. What is the general tone and theme of that story? With that in mind, I generally hit up some kind of name generator. I randomly generate several and write down the ones that “stick”.

They “stick” if they stand out without being too bizarre, or invoke any kind of feeling when I first read them. I can’t define the feeling, it’s just something rather than nothing. Some names, however, are the perfect ones, and those usually invoke more than just something.

With perfect names, I immediately see the character. Right there, like they were standing in front of me. I immediately know their personality, and it’s sometimes different than what I originally anticipated, but it’s right nonetheless. And sometimes, sometimes these names come with characters so complete that an entire full story spins out of them.

An entire freaking story.

A semi-minor character in PRIMUS had this happen, and now he might have an entire series of spin-off novels all to himself. The same happened to the two characters I found for this flash fiction. Their names gave me personalities, the personalities gave me backstories, which then fed into my original idea for the flash fiction and created a whole separate novella.

So now I have even more stories to write.

Not that I’m complaining. But for the first time I really recognized how important names are to me for my characters, and how much the name can really contribute to the overall story.

You wouldn’t think it would be that important. But it is.

And even as a reader, character names really impact how I feel toward that character. Awesome names make me love awesome characters on a whole new level, and hate/love villains even more, too.

Yep, for me, it really is all in the name. Everything.

Seriously.