WHAT'CHA CALL IT...

"The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers."  Marshall McLuhan

I have been thinking a lot about names lately. Since the novel I am currently working on is a fantasy, I have a lot more freedom in choosing names for characters and places.  Actually, I have a LOT more freedom.  And - that is not necessarily a good thing.

Since my previous novels were contemporary crime thrillers, the names were ordinary.  The places were real...or, at least, based on real places.  But - in this new novel-in-the-making - everything is fictional.  I have been reading a lot of fantasy novels lately - as well as doing research (as previously mentioned in my post about the Idiot Guides) - and the one thing that I find annoying is not having a clue how to pronounce the author's "fictional names."  I can't relate to a character with a name like, "xyqilka."  I'm sure the author had some pronunciation in mind...but he neglected to put it in the book.  And - when you have an entire cast of characters with equally bizarre names - then the story is reduced to whatever happened to the "xy" guy and the "lzp" girl.

J.K. Rowling was smart.  I know...duh!  But she had the sense to make her characters' names easy to pronounce - or "sound out" as they used to say when I was learning to read. (No...that was not when they were still carving things on stone tablets!)  Of course, Harry and Ron were ordinary names...and Hermoine, while not typical today, was still something people had heard of.  Even the names like Dumbledore and Hagrid were easy to figure out.  She had the ability to create something completely new - like Hogwarts - and make it accessible for every reader.

So...this is my current dilemma.  The plot is in place.  Most of the main characters are "fleshed out".  Now I am wrestling with names for the characters and for the fictional realms they inhabit.

I have a new appreciation for the creators of video games.  It takes a lot of imagination to birth a fictional world - and give everything a name.

Adam must have felt a lot of pressure in the Garden of Eden!!!  I can empathize!