Ransom Noble's Blog, page 20

Name Trends

Searching for a name for a person is a little different from deciding a name for a character. I suppose many of the principles are the same, but it still feels different.

A baby give the challenge of being an infant through an adult with the name chosen by the parents. Adding to the difficulty, they both have to agree. [I suppose there are ways around this, but we're pretending to live in a world where we'd like peace among both parents.]

In a book, it's nice to pick different names. Some stories have requirements – like historical fiction – where it's better to choose a name that might have been heard of during that era. Example: A novel set in the 1940′s would not feature a . The name has become popular for many boys since 1995, however, so a contemporary children's book could easily have a character with that name.

An author also might choose a name she didn't like for a character she didn't like, or to show how it didn't suit the character if she did like the guy. The beauty of names is that the possibilities are infinite, and the importance behind choosing the correct one for the character depends entirely on what the author wants to say. Would Isabella Marie "Bella" Swan be the same person to us if we knew her as "Izzy" instead of "Bella"? What about "Marie"? How about if we changed her name entirely to Meredith Sue Peregrine?

Then would Meredith be the #1 name on the list for the Social Security Administration's most popular baby names of 2010 instead of Isabella? Would Jacob be the top boy's name? If you're curious, one series of books – no matter how popular – can do all of this on its own. [Twilight was released in 2005, and the name Isabella had already inched into the in 2004.]

One thing that makes books so much easier to give the characters a name is that I usually don't have to worry about a childhood nickname and a grown-up profession and all the time in between. An author can write in the cruel naming twists that kids in school somehow figure out that are much worse than the ones found in . I'm not knocking the book; I own it. It's really much more about humor than what to seriously not name your child. My husband often jokes about Harry Potter by calling him Harry Potty. Somehow these kinds of insults never come up at Hogwarts or the public schools he attended before that.

The other reason it's so much easier to name a character in a book is that the last name can change if you want. If you find the name Parker and love it, you can find a last name to put with it. You can bend the rules of what to name boys or girls. Remember A Boy Named Beverly?

There are a lot of names on this . There are trends where some go more toward female and or more toward male, more popular or less popular in general. Some names seem to morph from one category to another.

What do you name the children, then? Something you can stand to shout at the top of your lungs several times a day for years on end, something you think the kids won't twist into a bad word, and something you hope the person your child grows into will fit and appreciate. Yeah, that's easy. And it's a bonus if every other kid in the class doesn't have the same name, too.

Why is all this on the top of my head? If you noticed yesterday's Silent Sunday post, you'll notice my daughter is checking out a secret in the ultrasound.

Silent Sunday

Balance versus Focus

Sometimes, it feels like the two are definite opposites. I'm curious how other people handle the many irons in the fire. Do you follow one, the most important, and let the rest fall as it will? Do you just not worry about it? Do you manage to keep each one just far enough from the flames to keep it from burning?

I'm struggling with my goals for the school year and where to place the emphasis. I always have too much going on to just let one thing be my entire world. Funny how easy it is to roll with the school year for goals when I tutor students. It's nice to have the summer, then get back in gear for fall.

Writing Habits

A writer is one who writes. For many, it becomes an ingrained habit with practice. Somehow it starts with an innocent scrap of paper to overcome many notebooks and writing files. Even through the rest of the activities of writing and life, writers are encouraged to write every day. Sometimes they're called morning pages, but not everyone manages to get them out every morning.

Do you write at a specific time every day? What do you write? Do you consider blogging writing? Do you just work it in when you can in your day, or do you allot specific time to do it? If you miss that time, does your day feel off? Under what circumstances can you not write and still consider yourself a writer? How many missed days before you feel like it's too far out of your niche to pick up the pen again?

Morning pages happen in the beginning of the day. One big reason behind making them morning pages is the parts of your day that are prioritized are more likely to happen. For many it's far too easy at night to say, oh, I'll do it tomorrow. After work and family and all the other commitments, it can just be too much. If there are reasons you allot a different time of day to writing, it has to be a priority in order to make certain it gets completed. Since my toddler is much more of a morning person than I am, my pages tend to be during naptime.

I consider blogging separate from writing. I struggle to always turn out fiction, though. Sometimes I make it about fiction or my goals, especially if I'm deep into rewriting something and the distraction to write something new will carry me away from the project that needs to be finished. But I know I have trouble finishing projects. It's why I have rough drafts lying around taunting me to polish them. One day I'm going to catch up – I swear…

All right. Not today or anytime soon.

I miss writing when I haven't for a space of a few days. It doesn't happen often. Rarely a few other priorities try to raise their ugly heads and get some attention. I hate it when that happens.

How sacred is your writing? Do you maintain morning pages or some other form of daily writing activity? I'd love to hear what you do to get back on track when the inevitable derailing occurs.

What About School?

There are so many things about school that people love or hate. But one thing that seems to come up more often are the different options about schooling.

I went to public school, as did many of my peers. It's something we have in common. We expect certain things, whether included in anecdotes from way back when or while reading a fictional story. I'll admit I open-enrolled to a different school than my assigned choice based on geography after a move during high school, but that seemed the best choice at the time.

Open-enrollment is still a good choice for many students, and they're choosing it more often. Another choice families are making is to move to the school district where they want their children to go to school. We did take school districts into consideration, though the final three choices of houses when we looked (three years ago while pregnant) all ended up in one school district. Luckily, we didn't mind that district at all. The elementary school is visible from my house, which we didn't know when we purchased it.

Some students go to private schools. I'm not sure how they view charter schools, if they're part of the private phenomenon or something else they haven't figured out a good word for yet. Private schools often tend to be based on the same principles as public school: learning from a desk with a teacher, though they do their best to make it better than what someone gets in public school – or at least to try to make it seem that way to be worth the cost. Many of the private schools in my area are religious-based. In addition to the regular subjects, students are also taught their particular religion.

Charter schools started in the 1990s and has several success stories. Instead of the usual teacher, desks and books – they try learning in different ways. Some of them incorporate radical learning methods to make things more interesting and fun for students. I remember a few in Chicago with great results teaching kids discipline through yoga.

There are also choices to not attend a school, but to learn from home. Home school options are many and varied, incorporating almost everything from guided learning in the real world to workbook packets to study from at the kitchen table. One of the newer catch words is unschooling. Many times the question for these children is socialization, once the question of whether their academics were up to snuff, and home schooling associations exist to associate with other children. Unschoolers are often out in the world with people of all ages (or that is the premise of unschooling) to learn from everyone and work with all kinds of people while they do it.

Theories abound on the best way for a child to learn. Many burn our public schools in recent years and worry about the state of education. Are you worried about your kids? Do you think I'm worried about mine? While the answer is probably yes to both questions – also consider this from an author's standpoint. I write books for young adults. There are so many options for education and learning, and at some point all of those will enter into books.

Is your heroine the kind who was unschooled? Is she struggling with certain things, either as a student or as an adult who never got into the subject because she was never interested in it? Did your hero have issues with public school and rebel against all authority figures? Is your private school student the only one in her class who didn't go Ivy League when her charter school sister made it?

Maybe all the different kinds of school can be shown in both good and bad lights in fiction, and it's up to the author on how the characters need it to be for the story. There is truth and there is an ability to push it only so far for believability.

I'm thinking of exploring all of that, somehow. How does school affect your YA protagonist and the other characters in your stories?

Silent Sunday

Synopsis vs Outline

Writing the story is the fun part. All the rest can come later.

However, the time has come for later – and I find I really hate this synopsis. I hate the outline, too, but I can't argue with them being valuable tools at some stage.

I wrote this novel draft piece by piece, knowing only what came a little farther ahead and where I wanted to the end. That means I kept writing until I got to the end, realized that I needed a little more wrap-up and I fixed that. Except I'm still not done.

Now's where it gets tricky. I have an outline. It follows each chapter and the events that happen. Through the rewrite it is not completely up to date but it's manageable. I keep making notes on where to change it and it's slowly coming out in the novel rewrite. It's also about three pages single-spaced, and growing, and too long for my word count to be directly funneled into a synopsis.

I took it to a writing conference some time ago, so I already wrote the synopsis. It handles only the major plot points from the beginning to the end and stands by itself at less than two pages double-spaced. All major characters, including the cat, are mentioned and show movement throughout.

The current issue between the two of them is that they're not in agreement. Not completely. Sure, I can find every single point from the synopsis in the outline, but they're not exactly in order. Is that a problem? I'm not sure, but it makes me want to rethink and reorganize both of them until they're more in agreement.

That sort of brings me to the point where I'm at war with both of them. It's ugly and it's bloody (because I'm using a red pen, of course), and it's only going to get worse when I scrap them both and start revisions on the manuscript with the pieces. I know it will work out eventually, but I hate this stage a little bit. I want to know if I have all my plot points nailed and if the book is saying what I want it to say: synopsis. However, I also need to keep the rest of it flowing well and honing in on the goal with the character development and the other events that foreshadow the big pieces: outline.

Send supplies in the form of finger foods and an energetic nanny. It wouldn't hurt to clone me. Then one could go to my jobs and play with my toddler while the other one huddled in solitary and simply finished the stories. Wait – let's make two clones. That toddler business is full-time.

Revision

Some writers revise as they go, so in touch with their inner editors that they choose each word with a deliberate grace.

I am not one of those writers. I'm often not afraid to just throw in an approximate word to get me through the first draft. There is room to revise later and I'm very fond of whoever said "You can't edit a blank page." Someone could easily have the next bestseller in her head but without ever putting it down on paper the public will never know. So I race through the rough draft sometimes, if the characters and plot come easily, and then see what I have at the end.

Then comes time for revision. There have been a couple stories where what I have at the end isn't what I thought I was going to write about in the beginning. Somehow the story took me with it and the characters made their own decisions – just like they're supposed to. The next thing you know I get to struggle with whether to remake them into my original vision or let their own ideas shape my final manuscript.

"Burning Bright" was one of those manuscripts. I had the two of them with a different mission, to find another version of remnants of life in the story. They made their own rules and informed me later, which worked out well enough for me but not so well for Isra. When I read it after I finished the draft, I realized how much they needed to have the plot go the way they took me rather than how I planned to take them.

Still means I have a lot of things to revise. Earlier plot points that would have led to my original ending had to be rerouted. The character development sometimes needs to get a little deeper. Every now and then entire characters have to be ousted from the story. They're generally bit parts that just clutter the story I'm telling, and I can't see that until I'm finished.

The good news is once the process is finished, the sparkling story is ready to go somewhere and be read. In the process right now with another novel, and now I'm wondering if the title doesn't fit the story. Still, just another piece to revise and make the best I can manage.

What are your rituals through revision? Do you follow the set vision in your head as you go, or do you let the drafts fly and fix them later?

Prolific

From dictionary.com: prolific is defined as producing in large quantities or with great frequency; highly productive: a prolific writer.

It's true, some writers can push out a lot more words than others. Recently I heard a comparison between Toni Morrison and Danielle Steel to show that Toni Morrison had 9 novels out to Danielle Steel's 70. However, I counted this morning and I got 86 for a similar time period. To compare with an author I've actually read – Mercedes Lackey has 116 novels out in half the time, just over twenty years instead of forty.

Mercedes Lackey is one author I think of as prolific. She's been described that way on her book jackets. Sometimes I wonder if that's what you say when you're not sure what else to say, but over a hundred novels out in twenty years? I'm not sure there's another word to describe that. One great thing about a prolific author is a reader spends much less time lurking in bookstores trying to find that next sequel. I'm sure I could put Dean Koontz in there as another example.

So when a new friend from the festival and I were chatting and I explained how I couldn't really combine all these ideas I have because they're so different – she said I might just have to be prolific. And she might be right. Well, there might be a way to combine stories about teen pregnancy, time travel, and the random urban fantasy in my head, but they each have their own story lines. Not to mention the mainstream YA novel I've been working on lately.

Though I'll admit I've let a lot of things get between me and that novel lately. However, I figured out how to show the one scene I've been missing over the weekend, so I think I can dig into that rewrite pretty well now.

Maybe this overflow of ideas is just what happens to some authors. We can't stop the ideas from flowing and we just can't wait to get to the next one, though we do our level best to make a good solid manuscript before moving on. Is that why I'm happy to put a story to bed at some point and not endlessly rewrite the same characters over and over? I have a couple more sets of characters telling me their stories already – I can't make just one into the baby of the family and coddle them more than they need.

What are your thoughts of prolific – or not – writers? What do you think drives them to put out that much work? Why don't all writers do this?

What's Real?

I read an article by Kitty Kelley entitled Unauthorized, But Not Untrue. She wrote about the unauthorized biography, of which she has written several, and how much trouble she gets into because she tries to write the truth. Her latest publication is Oprah: A Biography.

It leads me to question what is real, though. Are the ideals we hold real? Are they truth? How do we decide to believe one thing and not another? When do we say one person is right and another is wrong? When did our world become black and white?

I wonder if celebrities [term used loosely] realize the myths they create around themselves. Some of them must, or we wouldn't have jobs for publicists other than to promote the person. Did a publicist or media consultant type person create the idea of spin? Perhaps it was around earlier than that, when one interesting person decided to take advantage of the way an event played out.

Who would we elect as President if we knew the little secrets? Myths are associated all the way back to George Washington, so we've been creating new images for our leaders since our country began. At some point we learn he probably didn't cut down a cherry tree, that the legend cropped up around his legendary honesty. So what would a man like that say about the people we elect today? Are we even allowed to be honest with ourselves if we're trying to gain a foothold in the public eye?

The next question is how does it affect the rest of us? When we have a leader who is known for honesty, are the common people more honest? When we don't know what to think about the people who are making decisions for the rest of us or who we idolize just for being, will that change how we expect others to behave? I wonder if that's when we let the little lies slide, because there are so many larger and more hurtful untruths out there lurking.

I'm not sure I know what's really supposed to be the truth. If I can't find it, how do I know it really exists? Maybe we can change the very fabric of existence by the different stories we tell each other and what we choose to believe. There might be another explanation entirely, but I'm a fiction author. It's my job to tell a story that isn't true.

There are a lot of questions today – anybody feel up for some answers? I'd love it if you'd weigh in.