Barbara Ankrum: Naming Characters

As an author, I get a lot of questions about process. How do I start? What’s the first thing I come up with? Plot? Conflict? Characters?

Yes.

That’s my answer. All of the above. Because all of those things are so interconnected, I usually have all three in my head as I’m thinking up a new book. Characters and character arcs factor in heavily, because I have to know where these two people are going and what they’re going to learn along the way. What’s in the way of that journey is the conflict.

But before I can start the actual writing, I need the H & H’s names. How characters look is often secondary. Names are essential to me to get a handle on character.  Sometimes, I just know them immediately. Other times, I go through lists. After I pick a name, I will scroll through photos and Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB—a movie geek site) for faces until I find the right look (that fits the name.) Mind you, this might seem like surface stuff, but it’s not. It’s all connected to character and conflict and back story and how I feel about the character.

This rule, however, can backfire on me. In a recent book I was forced to change the names of both characters three times, which—not coincidentally—also entailed rewriting the entire beginning as many times, because the name can essentially change how I think about a character and a character’s voice. And the characters (and story) were just not working for me. Oy!

Then there was the time, a couple of books ago, (I won’t divulge which one…) when I was about three-quarters of the way through, merrily typing away, and I looked at my hero’s name (as one does) and suddenly felt my heart sink. I’d been writing his name for a few months and never once did I recall that I’d actually used his name once before for another hero. (Wha—??) It was an old book, written a long time ago, granted, but still.  Two heroes with the same name would be…wrong.
For a whole day, I froze, horrified at the prospect that this guy I’d been writing all along would need a new name and the thought of changing it mid-stream is just…just…I can’t even. It was like giving my heroine a whole new guy! Not only that, I felt it might essentially change the tone of the story I was telling if I changed it then. Go on, you can think I’m crazy. I don’t mind.

I knew it would be easier for my readers to accept a different name for my hero (from the start) than it would for me to change it, mid-stream, so I decided to finish the book using the original name rather than try to change it as I was just getting to the black moment. That would allow me to continue with him emotionally without disruption. So when I finished the book, I did a soul search for a name I could fall for and after a long day of rejecting possibilities, I found one. I did a global search and replaced his name.

Moral of the story: everyone loved his name. No one thought he was weird or wrong. I even loved his name in the end and felt it added something unique to him. But I was glad I didn’t mess with him in the telling of the story. Who knows what might have happened?

But that just goes to show how delicate the process of creation is. Or the craziness of the creators! (Eh-hem…speaking only for myself, of course.)

I can still remember the names some of my favorite heroes and heroines from books I read years ago. My keepers. What are some of your all time faves?


Barbara Ankrum’s brand new historical romance, THE RUINATION OF ESSIE SPARKS—Book #2 of her Wild Western Rogues Series—hits the stands April 2, 2016!

Barbara Ankrum: Hot Alpha Sheiks And Other Tales From The Old West

I turned in a book a week or so ago, which is always cause for celebration for me.  Getting to the end of a book is like giving birth and mostly, as in childbirth, we authors tend to forget the labor pains of that last book when we start writing the next one. This one was a historical, a particularly prickly story that took me a long time to finish. Its progress was interrupted, over the course of a year, by several other book deadlines, a personal crisis, an unexpected move halfway across the country, and all the regular chaos of life.  And more than once, during that year, I felt like running away from home. No, seriously, I did. But I didn’t run.  I stayed at my keyboard and finished that story.  

The title, “The Ruination of Essie Sparks,” came to me as I was doing the head-to-desk smack over some character issue, and might just hold some clue about my conviction that Essie was going to be the death of me—or her—whichever came first.  My very alpha half-breed Cheyenne hero accidentally-on-purpose steals her from the Indian Industrial School she’s teaching at and drags her off to the wilds of Montana, where they run for their lives from the men chasing them. Essie, who is already at the end of her very frayed rope when this occurs, must choose over and over in this story: to stay or go, love or hate, to live with fear or courage.  And inevitably, I fell madly in love with both of them, thank goodness.

But in the middle of writing it this last go round, I was quite shocked to realize this was a sheik-in-disguise book set in the old west. Now, I don’t write sheiks, though some of my favorite authors, like Jane Porter, do and they’re wildly hot and alpha and loads of fun. I write both emotional, adventurous western historicals and on-the-lighter side contemporaries for Tule.  But not, specifically, sheiks. This book was, however, that same fantasy at play of being swept away from it all by some alpha male to some other place that is not your known world. Of turning the tables and shifting the power, not just in the literal relationship between the hero and heroine, but in how my heroine perceived herself in the world. Coincidentally, it was a book that I not only wanted to write, it was a book I needed to read. (I jest. There was no coincidence about it!)

As a long time mentor to new writers, I remembered the many times I’ve told my students that theme—or that underlying issue or moral of their story—is something very personal and to expect it to show up over and over in their writing. (They’re always shocked to learn this.) Theme will even show up in your reading if you’re a reader. If you go take a look at your bookshelves, you’ll probably find common themes threading through your favorite books. No doubt those themes will vary at different times in your life. At least, they do on my bookshelf. We read books, novels in particular, to feed our imaginations and often, to work out things we’re dealing with in our lives.  Romance in particular, speaks to women’s fantasies and issues, and reading is a much safer bet to resolve those than say…actually running away. And so much less complicated.

Discovering how closely this book allied with my own struggle this year also reminded me that romance serves a real purpose beyond straight entertainment (which I hope it also does.)  Romance puts up a lens through which to look at ourselves, our choices, our foibles and even our flaws and helps us put them into perspective, safely.  Romance is more than pure escapism, though yay for that! There is a good reason why the genre has such a loyal and die-hard following. If romance also gives us reason to hope that we, too, can find our own power as women, then so much the better.

How about you? Was there ever a book you read that helped you sort through something in your life? Made you feel better about your choices or just got you through your day without running away?  I’d love to hear.  One lucky commenter will win a $10 AMAZON GIFT CARD.  

The Ruination of Essie Sparks will be available for pre-order soon and will release in early March. Thanks again to Lee Hyat for so sweetly inviting me to blog here monthly this year. I look forward to getting to know you all better!

Website: www.BarbaraAnkrum.com

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