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3. How do you come up with names for characters (and for places if you're writing about fictional places)?
This is a hard question--I might ramble a little. A lot of my plot ideas are dumped, fully formed, into my brain (I believe they come from Divinity, or really bored fairies. I'm an Eccentric Writer.), and they always come with names. In the novel I'm currently working on, Twixt, I didn't know the main character's name--Lottie--was short for anything, until I realized one day that she was Charlotte, a name I've always loved. Writing characters is like creating friendships...in the beginning, you don't know the deepest heart of someone you just became friends with, but--over time--you drill down to the very essence of who they are.
I have a tiny list of Really Cool Names that I want to eventually give to kick-ass characters (Ave, the werewolf from The Lockless Door, is a character with one of my Really Cool Names XD), but I don't use the list often.
In House of Wolves, the main character's name is Lucy, and the secondary character is Treisse. I've found that I usually do this sort of naming convention in most of my recent books--the main character has a recognizable name, and the second character has a unique and interesting one. Like Elizabeth and Ave (The Lockless Door), Amy and Elovee (Sweetwater), and to a lesser extent, Cassandra (Casey) and Vanessa (Meadowsweet). Persephone and Hades could not be helped ;D (Hymns for Her).
Naming places makes me ridiculously happy. I write dark fantasy/paranormal/urban fantasy YA, so many of the places are invented and in their own universes--LOTS OF NAMING FUN! In Twixt, I stayed on the side of Obvious. There's Mad House, Abeo (the sleep of death) City, and Twixt itself (a sort of purgatory place between death and life).
This is a hard question--I might ramble a little. A lot of my plot ideas are dumped, fully formed, into my brain (I believe they come from Divinity, or really bored fairies. I'm an Eccentric Writer.), and they always come with names. In the novel I'm currently working on, Twixt, I didn't know the main character's name--Lottie--was short for anything, until I realized one day that she was Charlotte, a name I've always loved. Writing characters is like creating friendships...in the beginning, you don't know the deepest heart of someone you just became friends with, but--over time--you drill down to the very essence of who they are.
I have a tiny list of Really Cool Names that I want to eventually give to kick-ass characters (Ave, the werewolf from The Lockless Door, is a character with one of my Really Cool Names XD), but I don't use the list often.
In House of Wolves, the main character's name is Lucy, and the secondary character is Treisse. I've found that I usually do this sort of naming convention in most of my recent books--the main character has a recognizable name, and the second character has a unique and interesting one. Like Elizabeth and Ave (The Lockless Door), Amy and Elovee (Sweetwater), and to a lesser extent, Cassandra (Casey) and Vanessa (Meadowsweet). Persephone and Hades could not be helped ;D (Hymns for Her).
Naming places makes me ridiculously happy. I write dark fantasy/paranormal/urban fantasy YA, so many of the places are invented and in their own universes--LOTS OF NAMING FUN! In Twixt, I stayed on the side of Obvious. There's Mad House, Abeo (the sleep of death) City, and Twixt itself (a sort of purgatory place between death and life).
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