Yes, I said, “giveaway.” In honor of the upcoming launch of my 4th book, Brand the Author (Not the Book), I’m giving away 24 copies of my author branding workbook coupled with the incredible Kris Spisak’s The Novel Editing Workbook.
Enter for a chance to be one of 24 lucky winners by May 12th.
Talk about a wonderful pairing! If you want to write books and publish long-term, these two author workbooks will help you succeed. I promise!
The Novel Editing Workbook, a guidebook for both traditionally or indie-published writers, teaches the art of self-editing to help authors take their work-in-progress to the next level. It is the perfect complement to Brand the Author (Not the Book), which I wrote to guide you step-by-step through the process of structuring your own written author brand plan.
Sounds too good to be true? Not at all! Twenty-four winners will receive one of each book. And ONE of those lucky winners will receive both books PLUS a box of author-related goodies (it will absolutely include chocolate).
Be the Boss of Your Author business with The Novel Editing Workbook and Brand the Author (not the Book). Click here to get all the details about how to enter to win. Note: If you are a current subscriber to my newsletter, you will need to enter your email address again.
Every author has their own method and reason for picking a fictional character’s name. We are calling up spirits, birthing new people (or magical creatures), and this decision is weighty. The line from the knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is applicable here: “You must choose. But choose wisely, as the true grail will bring you life, and the false grail will take it from you.”
When the name selection moment comes, I essentially have three parameters for choosing character names. The first, no surprise, is related to Shakespeare’s line, “What’s in a name?”…
Spirit Painting, by Frederick Walker.
One: Choose character names based on meaning
Years ago, there was a baby-naming book called Beyond Jennifer and Jason. Rather than providing Gaelic and Old English meanings, which are important to some authors, the names in that book were categorized by how people view those names. Primarily centered on the western world viewpoint (with some foreign categories), the first names were sorted by whether we viewed those people as creative, strong, odd, intelligent, troublesome, etc.
I loved this approach, and incorporated such thinking into my selections to ensure they fit the personalities of the characters I was building. Boys named “Arthur” are very likeable and reliable. I needed him to be that even in the moments when he wasn’t.
For my Native American characters, I needed a source to help me inject the meaning for a culture clearly not my own. For me, NativeLanguages.org was my source. Although the website a bit antiquated, and it required a donation, the resource allowed me to provide them details about personality, gender, nation, clan, era, and region. When I received each response, I was given name options along with explanations, and even nicknames. Authenticity is important, which for historical novelists, leads me to this suggestion…
Two: Choose an appropriate character name
A name that’s rife with meaning can become a stumbling block for readers if it doesn’t fit the time period or geography. Sources like newspapers, tombstones, and legal documents—if they exist for your time period—help ensure the name feels authentic to the era and your fiction.
For Carrying Independence, I first settled on my protagonist’s location and then I headed to the genealogy section of the library and studied birth and death records for the region and year. In one column I wrote all the first names I loved (for both men and women—for my protagonist has friends), and in the other column I wrote last names.
Then, like a teenager signing her name over and over to get it just right, I compiled first-and-last name combinations. Nathaniel Marten, Arthur Bowman, and Silas Hastings were born. (The latter was also an homage to the character Silas Marner by George Elliot—a book my grandmother loved, with a miserly character like my own.) However, choosing a name out of love must be coupled with asking if I can live with it…
Three: Choose an enduring character name
In early drafts of my Revolutionary era novel, Carrying Independence, I named my protagonist’s horse after King Arthur’s steed, Llamrei. It’s weird to pronounce, and the double “L” became an ongoing problem as I repeatedly spelled it wrong. After draft three, the horse became Bayard. That lesson, along with the realization that writing historical fiction sometimes takes years, helped me create a few parameters. For character names I ask myself, can I:
Repeatedly say it and it will grow on me?
Type it correctly every time?
See the character or creature becoming one with the name?
See the character’s name becoming memorable/repeatable for readers?
Make sure isn’t too close in sound or spelling to the other names?
The latter is important to my father. He finds it frustrating when the main characters have names like Larry and Lemmy. There are 25 other letters of the alphabet to choose from, people. As for my mother, I know she and I are going to talk about these people as if they are people, and if we can’t get it right as I send her drafts, it’s not going to work. (Yes, my parents read my work.)
What parameters do you have for character names, or which character names do you remember most? For me, Indiana Jones will always remain one of my favorite character names, made even more memorable when it’s revealed by his father, “We named the dog Indiana!”
Reader Insights: The name of my main character in my newly published short story, Mary Angela’s Kitchen, came from food. I was telling a friend about story idea—which came to me in a dream—while we ate pizza and tiramisu at an Italian restaurant. The place is called Mary Angela’s. You can order her story, which includes four recipes, as an ebook and also in print.
Over the last couple of weeks, I conducted two live webinars on the topic of researching female historical figures or ancestors using some of my own organization and exploration methods—those of a historical novelist.
In total, over 535 people registered for the webinars, and a great portion of them are now out there thinking about their endeavors a little differently. They’re not researchers or genealogists. They’re storytellers.
Why researchers need to think like novelists?
Gathering dates about a person’s life ignores (and worse, buries) the impact of that life. Think of your own history. If I only knew family tree facts about you—the dates and locations of birth, death, and marriage for your family, children, and in-laws… Well, how much would I really understand about your life story?
I’d be ignoring your education, career, your neighbors and friends, your book clubs, adventures, influences, hopes, disappointments, and all your small and significant milestones. I’d also be unable to determine your contributions, if any, to our greater American story.
Why details in women’s stories matters.
Gathering only dates about female ancestors—or “Patriots” as they are known in the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR)—perpetuates a major problem in our educational system; the women are not being shown as integral to American history in proportion to their contributions and achievements.
By gathering only genealogical details, researchers like Margot Shetterly would not have unearthed the hidden figures in our history. Margot’s deeper exploration helped us learn about all those women, like mathematician Katherine Johnson, who helped humans go to the moon.
American history is a human story.
It’s easy when there are over 900 biographies of George Washington, to think that American history was primarily made by men. Thankfully, a few of those biographies are written by women (thank you, Alexis Coe), but casting blame as to why women’s contributions are only a small portion of our collective American history, isn’t going to change it. We must change it.
Your mission is to become storytellers.
We must look at American history as human, and to do that more women need to become storytellers who can balance the history by showing us the other gender.
Together, along with 185,000 DAR members doing the same, we can show future generations how women—both famous and ordinary—contributed in extraordinary ways to our American history.
How to conduct and organize research.
Okay, but how do you become a storyteller? Like a novelist, you need to expand your subject’s network, and then you need to better catalog your own researcher’s network.
My video and links below will help you come to understand these two areas. This is the full webinar, free to watch. Included below are links the notes and the networking charts explained in the webinar.
Watch. Share this post.
Together we women can rise and shine the light on women’s history.
GET THE NOVEL: If the webinar content impacts your thinking, I hope you’ll order a copy of Carrying Independence to show your support for such presentations, and to see my research suggestions in action. Print & Ebook retailers, and excerpts can be found at: CarryingIndependence.com.
Compassion is the key to understanding history. Too often, readers and historians look on the past with a kind of arrogance, not just judging their forbears, but absolving themselves of the basic human flaws that have inspired the mistakes and tragedies of the past. We, of course, would never submit without protest to the kinds of misdeeds our ancestors committed. Or would we?
And, by setting our own humanity above our ancestors, don’t we also deny ourselves the chance of learning from their accomplishments?
A much better approach to history is to recognize, as the art historian Sir Kenneth Clark concluded in his great [1969] television series Civilisation, that “men haven’t changed much in the last two thousand years.” With this in mind, we can embrace the past and recognize in it the story of ourselves.
George Washington did not achieve victory in the Revolutionary War because he was better than human, but because he made the most of his humanity. The British mishandled the Irish Famine of 1846-52 not because they were exceptionally evil, but because they gave in to instinctive flaws, such as fear, that we also share. And the men and women who fought in and experienced the First World War, such as the four individuals I describe in my book Never in Finer Company, succumbed or overcame based upon the resources inside themselves.
You can follow Edward Lengel, independent author and historian, via his blog, Facebook, or Twitter. He is currently Colonial Williamsburg’s Revolutionary in Residence. When not writing “cracking good stories,” he’s often hiking through history and giving tours and talks.
Thanks for sharing in the spirit of learning about our collective American History by subscribing to the blog. Guest posts like this one are welcomed and encouraged. Contact me for details.
From November 10–12, the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia will provide free admission for veterans, active and retired Military, and Blue Star families (courtesy of Comcast/NBCUniversal). If you’ve never been to Philadelphia, or to this museum, it is without question worth a weekend trip.
Museum of the American Revolution. Creative Commons photo by Gordon Makryllos.
Events to Commemorate Veterans Day
Throughout this Veterans Day weekend, the museum will host special programs and tours. Among other activities related to early American soldiers and their families, will be a talk on Friday, November 9th by Russell Shorto. His book Revolution Song highlights six unique people who supported the Revolutionary cause.
Of interesting note, the image on the cover of Shorto’s book, has also been interpreted in one of the bronze sculptures featured on the exterior of the museum. The sculpture features Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” It was designed and donated by Chinese-immigrant and U.S. citizen, artist Ellen Qiong Schicktanz (see the piece here).
Emanuel Leutze: Washington Crossing the Delaware. 1851. Currently housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
