Give your story a personality with some imaginative names for your characters. Last week I came across a Bulstrode Whitelocke, which has a rather Dickensian feel to it and is entirely real, and it got me thinking about how authors use names.
So, you’ve written those immortal words, ‘The End’. You’ve had your masterpiece (final draft, right?) read by some well-meaning friends and family who all agree that it’s brilliant. It can’t fail, they say.
Sorted.
Hang on though. Before you parcel up your precious manuscript and send it out for consideration, there are a few things that you should double check. And then check again.
This week I’ve been plotting a whole new novel. I read a lot of crime and I’ve wanted to write a novel that includes a crime – not particularly a whodunit, but one that hinges on a murder – for a long time, and a story has been slowly developing on the back burner. But I’ve always been a bit reticent. Have I got the necessary brainpower to work out all the intricacies and tell a story without inadvertently revealing the secret or the perpetrator? It’ll be very easy to drop hints unintentionally, even reveal the whole façade, if I give a character some knowledge they shouldn’t or couldn’t have.
On the premise that you can’t edit a blank page, get something written down. If you’re experiencing the same kind of angst as me – too much to do and not enough time to do it in – consider this piece of advice I read a while ago: if you gave up just one of your soaps every evening and concentrated on writing something instead you would have the best part of a novel by the end of the year. Now, I’m no-one to talk, I’m a sucker for quiz programmes and whodunits myself, but there is some merit in the idea.
I’ve always been drawn to epistolary novels – those stories written as a series of documents, most often letters or postcards. The word epistolary is derived from the Greek word epistolé, meaning a letter, and the form can add realism to a story by introducing different viewpoints without employing the device of the omniscient narrator, which, especially for new writers, can be unwieldy and difficult to manage.
In an epistolary novel the third person omniscient – where the story is related by a head-jumping narrator who knows and sees everything that happens within the world of the story, including what each character is thinking – is supplanted by a series of communications that imparts information about the other characters, thus allowing the narrator to tell the reader things they couldn’t otherwise know.
I always find it a problem to come up with appropriate and relevant titles for my work. My imagination stalls when called upon to produce something pithy, apposite and meaningful. Some writers I know can’t put pen to paper or finger to keyboard without having first decided on the title. Personally, if it were possible to have a profusion of computer files and folders all labelled ‘Working Title’, I’d be there. Sensibly, this is no way to operate, so I’ve been thinking about where we can find inspiration when we’re stuck.
We can link the title to a scene in the story, the historical period it’s set in or that mysterious discovery the whole plot hinges on. The message of the story, the mood or the scenery can all be reflected in the title.
Over the past few weekends I’ve been mildly entertained by a neighbour’s attempts to cut down a tree in his garden. The tree was probably deserving of the treatment; it was a straggly old conifer that had overstayed its welcome but the whole felling procedure – and believe me, the production was worthy of Cecil B de Mille – got me thinking about familiar landmarks and how I can use them in my writing to add some individuality as well as colour, texture and even humour. They don’t need to be large or dramatic, in fact, for our purposes, small is definitely beautiful. It’s all in the detail. Here’s a selection of sights that are familiar to me and probably surround us all in some shape or other:
Now that we’ve got the writing venue settled, do we need any particular tools?
If you use a computer or a word processor – yes, I still have one in the cupboard under the stairs. An unwise purchase that was upgraded to the PC I swore I didn’t need almost as soon as it was out of the box – do you have favourite fonts or size of typeface? Some fonts seem to lend themselves to particular styles of writing. I usually write in 10-point Verdana, but I’ve been through my Comic Sans MS (humorous writing) and Arial (reports and reviews) phases too.
Does it matter where you write? Do you have a special place where the words flow more freely, or can you scribble away in front of the television? Can you write amongst chaos, or do you need privacy and absolute silence? Is music forbidden, or do you like the comfort of the radio twittering away to itself in a distant room?
Is the spare bedroom your private hideaway, or does the kitchen table suffice? Does the literary muse stubbornly refuse to descend until you’re huddled in the cupboard under the stairs, or sitting in bed with your laptop and a cup of tea?
That’s an unnecessarily long word, a bit of a tongue-twister, so what does it mean?
It’s a personal thing. These days, I may describe myself as my partner’s significant other, but I’m also a librocubicuralist. It’s not an either/or situation; I can be both, because the definition of the word is ‘someone who reads in bed’. Though how I’m going to introduce that nugget into my novel is anyone’s guess. I’ll have to file it with runcible, hirsute and discombobulate until a suitable occasion presents itself.
But I digress…..This post was supposed to be about A Literary Ramble.
Maggie Cammiss 