Patti O'Shea's Blog

Characters can be such a kick. Just when I think I have one of them down and that I’m unlikely to have a huge curve ball thrown my way, he/she throws me a knuckle ball. (For those of you unfamiliar with baseball, a knuckle ball is even more unpredictable/harder to hit than a curve ball.) It happened again just recently.

I’ve had Wyatt’s team (Eternal Nights) in my head off and on since I wrote his story. So I’ve had six years to get to know these guys. At first, it was mostly Flare talking, but over the years, I’ve learned more and more about Gravedigger and Z Man.The last piece I needed as Z’s heroine and she showed up a while ago, but I didn’t know her name or what she looked like. Both pieces of information arrived mid January.

And Z threw me a knuckle ball.

You see, Z is part Asian/Hawaiian, which I knew. His heroine as it turns out is a green-eyed blonde. That’s when he tossed the bomb my direction: his plan is to fall for a woman who’s at least part Asian herself. He never, not even once, mentioned this to me. Not in six years!

To say I was stunned understates things. I don’t know why he feels this way, but you know there has to be some sort of issue in there. Z was my normal guy, the one who has his head screwed on straight. Or so I believed. Now I’m going to have to spend some time probing, trying to discover the whys and whats. You’d think just once that I could have a character completely honest with me upfront. Too bad it’s never happened and probably never will.

Every character I write is one I feel drawn to and compelled to write. But there are some characters that go beyond that, some I have to write even if it means bringing them into an alternate universe. No lie.

One set of characters started out life in a contemporary world and I pulled them into a paranormal one. It involved a name change for the hero. He informed me that his first name was different in this alternate dimension and it also involved name changes for all his brothers and sisters. Okay. The heroine kept her name, but her entire life changed and her personality along with it.

Some might argue that this makes them different characters. I know better. These are the same people, but the circumstances of their world changed and that impacted who they are.

It’s actually kind of interesting. I’ve maintained from the beginning that if I rewrote Ravyn’s Flight and put different characters in the lead roles, that the story would be completely different. Oh, it might begin the same, but my characters’ choices drive the plot, my plot never drives my characters. Even if I wanted to write that way, I couldn’t. If I try to force my characters to do something they don’t want to do, they go on strike and I spin my wheels until I fix what they dislike.

I have another set of characters that will not go away. I’ve been turning things around in my mind, trying to find a way to get them into some kind of story since their original idea is going nowhere. I need to write them. I have a burning desire to write them. And I will. Eventually. One way or another.

I’m almost afraid to write this post, but I think my hero finally has a name. I don’t like it that much either, but like I said on Tuesday, I’ll take anything and smile at this point. The final choice? Mason.

My poor Twitter followers have been trying to help me for at least a week, probably longer, by tweeting me links to naming sites. I swear I have them all bookmarked. Actually, I must have 50 naming sites bookmarked by now, but so many of them have the same names. I also have a pretty extensive collection of reference books on names. Nothing helped.

The frustrating thing is that the name isn’t uncommon. I ran across it pretty early on and kept running across it, but my darn hero remained mute. Since I don’t like the name and he didn’t speak up to claim it, I continued to look. And look. And look.

I need names before I can get story/plot because what they’re called affects their actions. A Mason is going to behave differently from a hero named Jack or one named Scott, so it was critically important to me to get the correct name before I moved forward. It did get frustrating because he’s the third hero in a trilogy and I don’t need more than a couple of paragraphs on his story, but the third book wraps up the series arc and that could impact the earlier books, too.

Now that I have this vital piece of information, I can move forward with the next problems. I need pictures of my characters–it also helps me connect to their personalities–and I need to work out the three book arc. After that is in place, then I can think about the individual stories.

I do have some information already, but it’s the barest of frameworks, a patchwork of pieces that need to be sewn together to form the whole fabric of the trilogy. All I can do is hope this goes more smoothly than the name game.

The name game continues with my hero. I talked about this last week and it’s ongoing. Every time I think I have the right name, I get pulled up short. The problem is the overnight test. Basically this means the name has to stick overnight. This includes some test scenes with the name as I’m lying in bed. This hero nixed one of the names I thought was his at this stage.

The second name made it through this run, but when I woke up the next day and tested it again, it failed. I knew it hadn’t worked when his father wouldn’t call him by that name. Not that his father provided the correct name, but I rarely get helpful characters who provide information willingly.

Stubbornly, I continued to use the second name a few more days, but I finally was forced to admit that it wasn’t going to work.

It was back to the drawing board. I spent hours searching over the weekend and I have a third contender. I haven’t had time yet to run too many scenes through my head with this latest name–I’ve been falling asleep too fast–so I’m not calling it a done deal yet, but it has made it a few days with it in place. Personally, I’m not in love with it and it’s a name that strikes me as being old fashioned. Old fashioned enough to be unusual.

If it’s the right one, though, I’m not going to argue with him. I’ll take anything at this point so I can move forward with figuring out stories and arcs for the trilogy. I can’t do anything without the right names for my characters–it actually can and does influence action/plot.

And in the few hours since I wrote this post, my hero has rejected the latest name. The search continues.

Since I wrote my posts about the characters in my Works In Progress (WIP), one of my heroes informed me that his name isn’t his name. I hate when they do that. Last names aren’t a very big deal because when I think of them, I rarely use their surnames, but changing the given name does throw me.

The thing that’s so frustrating is that this is a character that’s been around for a long time and his name has always been Michael. Until now. Now he tells me it isn’t. That his name changed when he moved from a contemporary story to an alternate universe, and that in this alternate universe, he’s different from who he was before and he has a different first name.

His logic made sense to me, but the problem? He’s not telling me what his name is supposed to be. Oh, he’s happy to tell me what it isn’t. And apparently it isn’t any name I’ve come across online or in a naming book. At least so far.

I can’t even get him to give me a hint. A simple It starts with a B or whatever would help tremendously. But nope. No help from him whatsoever.

So in the meantime, I’m still thinking of him as Michael. If he doesn’t like it, maybe he’ll reconsider his level of cooperation.