During a discussion with some other authors, one of them admitted that she couldn’t remember the names of all her heroes and heroines. That kind of shocked me because I couldn’t imagine anyone forgetting characters that they’d spent months working with. In fairness to this author, she’s written probably 5 times the amount of books that I have–maybe even more. But I was curious, so I made a list of all my completed books starting with Ravyn’s Flight. I figure my earlier three books don’t count because those were practice books as I learned out to write. 
Without hesitation, I ran through all my h/h’s easily.
Then I decided to list the bad guys and the secondary characters. Now this is where I did run into some trouble. I couldn’t remember anyone in RF beyond the h/h and the secondary h/h. In Power of Two, I came up with the villain and three of the names of Jake’s teammates, but I couldn’t remember the name of the other quandem (oh! Tony, something or other de Luca? Something like that. It just came to me. The woman remains a mystery.), and the remainder of Jake’s team is a cipher to me as is the name of the general.
I leapt to Through a Crimson Veil next. It took me a good long while to remember Marc and hours to come up with his last name. Eternal Nights was easier, but then I was working on three more books with Wyatt’s teammates as heroes and it’s a more recent story. Easiest of them all was the anthology since there were really only three characters–my h/h and the bad guy.
In the Midnight Hour took some thinking because of the sheer number of secondary characters, but I did–eventually–come up with everyone. I think. I didn’t attempt this for In Twilight’s Shadow, the book I’m working on copy edits for right now, but I think I could come up with them, too, given some thinking time.
My next attempt was to name all the heroes and heroines in the projects I have in progress right now. The numbers are daunting because I have a lot of proposals in the works and most of them have stories that can spin off with more h/h’s. Naming the heroes was easy. I spewed those right out, although I only remembered Ethan’s last name and not his first name until I checked in some sent emails. For the life of me, though, I could not come up with his heroine’s name! It took hours before I remembered.
On the one hand, I just learned her name recently and she hasn’t been talking to me. On the other hand, I can’t believe I didn’t remember when I was working on that just days ago!
Anyway, this exercise was an eyeopener and it makes me think I should create a list of characters and file it in the front of each books folder for easy reference.
Tags: characters, names
*raises hand slowly* I don’t remember my characters. *blushes* I write a lot of shorts and sometimes I forget names. The “bigger” stuff I remember though.
One of my crit partners told me I needed to get a character folder together but I haven’t done it yet.
I bow to your memory skills.
I can see forgetting the characters you didn’t spend much time with. After all, I didn’t remember the Hope’s name even though I was just working on her project last week because I hadn’t spent much time with her. I’m thinking about a character sheet myself because I don’t want to forget in the future and after listening to everyone, I’m afraid I might.
Patti