Manual For Fiction Writers by Block, Lawrence (classic books to read .TXT) 📗

to time, hurling Carl and Cal and Carol and Carolyn all into the same chapter, peopling a crowd scene with Smathers and Smithers and Dithers and Mather. Be conscious of this sort of thing and avoid it. The fact that such duplication occurs in real life makes no difference. True, you will often find yourself in the presence of four or five Johns at the same time. Well, that's one of the differences between life and fiction, after all. Fiction is supposed to make sense.

Some writers try not to give any two characters the same first or last initials. Common sense should help you decide where this particular line ought to be drawn. Most readers probably won't confuse Al and Adrian, or Gooch and Gulbrandsen; many might be confused, or at least annoyed, by duplications like Hal and Mal, Gerry and Gary, Janet and Janice, etc.

2. WATCH OUT FOR FALLING STARS. Sometimes a name will pop into your mind. It has such a nice feel to it and fits your concept of your character so perfectly that you don't realize you've heard the name before.

Or even seen it in lights. When I worked for an illiterary agent some years back, a manuscript came in featuring a female character named Irene Dunne. A fine name, that, but I remembered mama, even if our client did not. When I pointed out that Irene Dunne was indeed the name of a rather prominent actress, he nodded thoughtfully. It had a nice ring to it, he said. But I couldn't quite think why.

Even if you don't fill your stories with people named Clark Gable and Norma Shearer, it's very easy to use the names of prominent people with whom you yourself may be unfamiliar. This is not something you need agonize over. If you're in any doubt about a particular name, if it sounds as though it might be too good not to be true, check an encyclopedia and a copy of Who's Who. (And, when you've done that, use your own judgment. The lead in After the First Death, a mystery of mine, was named Alexander Penn. Before the book saw print, I discovered there was a poet in the Soviet Union by that name. I thought about it for a while, and I realized how many changes I'd have to make, all the puns on the last name and everything, and I decided to let him change it.)

3. PICK INTERESTING NAMES. I know there are a lot of John Smiths in the world, and I wish them well, but I certainly don't want to encounter any more of their number in fiction. And if I were an editor I would certainly not be much impressed by an author with so impoverished an imagination as to fasten such a name on a character of his. Names like Smith and Jones and Thompson and Miller and Williams and Johnson are so common in real life as to be colorless in fiction. You might ring one in now and then for a minor character, but tend to avoid them altogether. They're just not interesting enough.

In this regard, let me furnish you with a piece of incidental intelligence. People who are rank amateurs at this business of inventing names, people picking an alias for a motel register or making up a false name on the spur of the moment, have a marked propensity to select as a last name an adapted first name. Richards, Peters, Johnson, Edwards?these are all common last names in their own right, but they're especially common as aliases.

What constitutes an interesting name and how do you pick it? Interesting question. I've become increasingly fascinated by names over the past few years and have devoted more attention to the problem of naming characters than I once did. Personally, I've come to favor lengthy last names rather than short ones, and uncommon names rather than common ones.

Some of the names I like best for characters are ones I've invented (which is not to say that they may not exist somewhere in real life). I've been doing a series of stories for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine featuring a criminous lawyer named Martin Ehrengraf, whose presumably unique surname is composed of two reasonably ordinary German words. My burglar, who's starred in two novels so far, is Bernie Rhodenbarr, and my friend Bill Pronzini wrote to ask if I'd created his name by combining those of two major-league pitchers, Rhoden and Barr. I hadn't; while trying to think of a name I recalled a relative of mine named Rodenberg, and I changed the ending, and I put the h in because it looked better that way, and a star was born.

If you keep a notebook?and you really should?you can stockpile interesting names for future use. A few years back writer and bridge expert Patricia Fox Sheinwold was boasting about her dog Honey Bear, whom she hoped to star in some dogfood commercials. If Bear turns out not to be photogenic, Pat said, they can always use her to do the bark-overs.

I laughed politely?what, after all, are friends for??and I scribbled Barkover in my notebook. In due course one Simon Barckover appeared as a talent representative in a book called The Topless Tulip Caper, by Chip Harrison.

Once I spent a night in a motel room in Grenada, Mississippi, with nothing to read but the phone book. Someone must have swiped the Gideon Bible. So I read the phone book and