Naming your Love Interest

Whenever I hear a good name, I try and memorise it in case it fits one of my future characters, much like some people do with future children. There's nothing I love more than finding the perfect name for my protagonist and knowing it's "the one." (It also provides hours of procrastination instead of actually writing...) But how do you find their perfect name?

When naming the love interest, I used to try and find a name that "went well" with my protagonist’s, but I quickly realised I was going about it all wrong. Your love interest will only work if they are a well-rounded character of their own BEFORE they meet your protagonist. Which means they need to have a name that stems from them (or their parents) rather than anything to do with your protag. Of course, if your protagonist is obsessed with a certain name, then your love interest's name might actually stem from them, but that's a rare event that I've only ever seen used in the genius play, The Importance of Being Earnest.

Choosing a name

Parents
Your character's full, official name would have come from their parents or legal guardians (we'll come back to nicknames), so you need to consider their heritage and parents' backgrounds. That includes race, religion, geographical background, social status, parents' values and even trends at the time when your character's parents would have been choosing their child's name. There's nothing worse than a 'Zane' popping up in a historical period novel.

Surname
British surnames often stemmed from old professions, so they are very important to consider when naming your characters. Even in fantasy, you have to know where your characters' surnames come from. Different cultures have different naming systems, such as "firstname" of "family name" or "father's name." If you do your research before choosing your characters' naming system, you can make sure their heritage is properly represented through the positioning or lack of a surname.

Nickname/chosen name
This is where you can solely look at your character and show what they think of themselves. Do they flaunt their given name, instead takeing a ludicrous nickname in rebellion of their parents/cultural expectations/ social standing/ political alignments? Are they trying to be ironic? Do they want to stand out so take an unusual nickname? Or are they in fact trying to blend in? A character's chosen nickname can reveal a lot about his or her personality in just one word. Contrast it to their given name and you open up another revealing window into their world view.

Given nickname
For obvious reasons, any nicknames that are given to your love interest (or any character) by others reveals how they are perceived by the world and therefore can hint at their character traits to the reader without having to expose them completely right away.

Character
Although your love interest will have realistically been named by someone else, you can do a Charles Dickens and hint at their personality through their given name. After all, most people suit their names, right? Think about sounds and connotations when trawling through that baby names website. Soft sounds like "S" and "F", will evoke different ideas of a character's personality than harder sounds like "K" or "T". Same rule with vowels and consonants.

Of course, you might want to invert all of this and call your character something that totally flaunts the rules! But the point is, you'll know why you're doing it, and that will show through in your writing. And as you might have noticed, this post could be related to any character, not just the love interest, but it's February and the theme is love so...... enjoy!

Experiment with Something That Scares You

October is the perfect month to prepare yourself for NaNoWriMo (if you partake) or just another month of writing for those who don’t, so why not… scare yourself?

I don’t mean by saying Bloody Mary three times in front of a mirror – although if you do that, would you let me know if it works? - but by tackling something totally out of the ordinary for you, within your writing.

For us YA writers and readers, we tend to stick within our own preferred age-range (I know it’s a bad habit of mine anyway) so occasionally I’ll make myself read books aimed at younger or older markets than YA. It’s amazing what branching out with your reading and writing can do for your writing skills. This October, try your hand at a paragraph or too of writing for a different age-range. 

Even if it’s not your cup of tea, you’ll be able to identify what it is that makes YA, YA, and why you love writing it so much, and either stick to it, or invert it some way that puts a new spin on your writing.

Then we have genre – personally, I love anything fantasy, sci-fi or thriller, which means those are naturally the books I’m drawn to at the book shops/libraries, as well as the ones I’ll pick up first from my bookshelf. But this October, I plan to shock myself and pick up some literary fiction or cosy mysteries. Maybe I’ll even dabble in some horror on October 31^st.

Because we all remember that amazing scene from “Bring it On” when the cheerleaders combine a range of dance styles to create a kick-ass dance routine (…. oh… only me then?) and I like to think experimenting with genres is a sort of the writing equivalent to creating that dance routine. As we read and write, we come to learn the expected tropes of a certain genre, which means we can use them, or invert them within the genre we prefer. You’re more likely to create that gobsmacking-ly original, cross-genre, industry-redefining novel if you’re well read in every genre there is out there, so get cracking!

Experimenting with tenses, POV, age-range, story-length, and genre means that you might discover a new style of writing that you absolutely love, but even if you don’t, you can combine all your new knowledge to make that sizzling dance routine. What makes that horror so scary? That thriller suspenseful? Romance swoon-worthy?

You’ll have fun finding out, discover new authors and genres that you love, and your writing will develop as a result. So, get out of your comfort zone and into that Halloween outfit! (and then do some reading and crazy writing.)

Villainous Struggles

Writing villains might come easy to some people, but creating a well-rounded, believable, (hopefully charismatic) villain is something I have to put a lot of careful thought and planning into. Protagonists and love interests often jump into my mind fully-formed, like Athena popping from Zeus’ head, but villains evade me. I think it is because for so long, I put my characters into categories such as those I just mentioned: protagonists, love interests, family members, friends and villains. And the reason why my villains just weren’t working was because I was treating them as such.

That’s when I realized…

NO ONE IS THE VILLAIN IN THEIR OWN STORY.

So, you know that sexist, pig-headed idiot who just hollered at you when you walked past them? In their head, they’re not the villain of that situation. They will go back home to their own story with their own justifications (however misguided) for shouting at people on the street. There are millions of personalities in this world, but most people don’t go around believing they’re evil. No one does evil deeds for evil’s sake. Take Voldemort, for example, who is pretty evil in my opinion… even old Voldy has a tragic past and quite a sad story following him into adulthood. He has reasons for believing the things he does and has been shaped by the events that have befallen him. OK so his twisted personality has meant that those events have turned him into a no-nosed, back-of-Quirrell’s-head weirdo, but the point is that we, the reader, understand to a degree what contributed to Voldemort’s villainy.

Many of the most iconic villains in books and TV have their own stories, which is what makes them so engaging to the reader/watcher. Having someone do ‘bad things’ isn’t enough to make your reader want to see their demise – we want to know their goals so we can rejoice when they’re scuppered, and their reasons for being the way they are so we can understand them in a sense.

Another brilliant example of this is Cersei from Game of Thrones. I won’t give away any spoilers, but we can all agree that Cersei is an awful human being. She has done atrocities that definitely place her in the ‘evil’ category. However, she is so damn interesting! She loves her children and family and puts them above all others, and is completely unapologetic about this fact. Despite her fortunate upbringing in terms of being ‘born well’, she has been discriminated against her whole life because of her gender, being forced to marry someone she despised instead of inheriting anything of her own right. Cersei has suffered hardships in her life, and therefore we understand why she has hardened into the person she is, even if we hate her!

When it comes to writing your villain, I would think of the word ‘antagonist’ instead, which derives from the Greek tragedy Antigone. Antigone is actually the protagonist of her own story, but she is seen to Creon as an antagonist as she doesn’t want to obey his rules and goes against his goals. This shows that your antagonist doesn’t have to be ‘bad’, they just need to want to stop the protaganist from reaching their goals.

Essentially, writing a good baddie is just like writing your goodie – you need to know who they are, what their history is, why they act the way they do and what they want to achieve.

Make us hate them. Make us understand them. Make us love to hate them. And make us rejoice when your protagonist triumphs over them.