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

discovered that there was a local family named Palmertree. I think that's a wonderful name, but I haven't yet found a place to use it. It's in my notebook, waiting.

4. FIRST NAMES CAN BE INTERESTING, TOO. Of late I've taken to using surnames as first names, and I like the effect of it. Nothing endows a character with the trappings of wealth and status like a proper British surname for his first name. Remember, a substantial number of first names started out as surnames?Milton, Seymour, Irving, etc. And the practice of giving a child a family name as a first name is a long-established one. In recent months I've named characters Wilson Colliard, Grantham Beale, Walker Gladstone Murchison, and so on.

Grantham Beale, by the by, started out as Graham Beale. But that began to sound too much like Graham Bell to me, as in Alexander Graham Bell, so he became Grantham instead.

5. DON'T GET TOO CUTE. If too many of your character names are too interesting, plausibility is sacrificed. You don't want the reader to be drawn into constant awareness of the unusual and original names you've fastened on your characters; that kind of awareness just gets in the way.

Ross Thomas likes interesting names for his characters, and I sometimes think he goes overboard. The police chief in The Fools in Town Are on Our Side is Homer Necessary, for instance. Now parents do name their sons Homer now and again, and Necessary is a perfectly legitimate surname, not an invention of the author's, but I just have a lot of trouble believing in Chief Homer Necessary, especially in the same book with Lucifer Dye.

Of course, if your fiction isn't supposed to be taken seriously, then your characters' names can be as outlandish as you can make them. Think of Ian Fleming's Pussy Galore, for example, or my own personal favorite?Trevanian's Urassis Dragon. (Hint?say it aloud.)

6. DON'T TWIST THE READER'S TONGUE. Even though your story or novel may not be designed to be read aloud, and even though you are not aiming your fiction at an audience of lip-movers, you should avoid throwing a jawbreaker of a name at your reader. He ought to be able to pronounce everything he reads. He may not say it out loud but he'll certainly be hearing it in his head, and it can throw him off-stride if he's unsure how it ought to sound.

This doesn't mean names have to be of the sort that every reader will pronounce identically. What's important is that the reader can assume he knows how to pronounce them.

Kerr, for instance, is sometimes pronounced to rhyme with fur, other times to rhyme with bar. The reader can't know for certain which you intend, but neither will he very likely lose much sleep over the question. He'll make up his own mind, probably without hesitation, and will forever after think of your character as Car or Cur, as the case may be. But if your character's named Przyjbmnshkvich, it's going to rub the reader the wrong way every time he encounters it.

7. RESEARCH YOUR ETHNIC NAMES. If one of your characters is a Latvian or Montenegrin or whatever, it's easy to add an authentic note to your work by picking a suitable name for him. A good encyclopedia comes in handy. If you want a Latvian character, look up Latvia and Latvian Language and Literature. Those articles will contain the names of any number of historical personages and writers. You take the first name of one and the last name of another, you put them together, and you've come up with an authentic and original Latvian name. It takes very little time and the result is quite impressive.

What's in a name? Plenty?and don't think Shakespeare didn't know it, considering the apt tags he fastened on so many of his characters. A rose by any name might smell as sweet, but would you send anybody a dozen American Beauty Skunkweeds?

CHAPTER 45

Repeat Performances and Return Engagements

EVAN TANNER had the sleep center of his brain destroyed by a piece of North Korean shrapnel, and he hasn't had a wink of sleep since. He lives in New York, on 105th Street west of Broadway, where he shares a fifth-floor walkup apartment with Minna, the sole surviving descendant of Mindaugas, ninth-century king of independent Lithuania. Tanner speaks dozens of languages, belongs to political nut groups and supports lost causes, and earns a living writing masters and doctoral theses for irresolute students. Intermittently he leaves the country as a sort of free-lance secret agent, nominally attached to a super-secret Washington agency but bending methods to serve his own ends.

Bernie Rhodenbarr also lives on New York's Upper West Side, at 71st Street and West End Avenue. He operates Barnegat Books, a marginal second-hand bookstore on East 11th Street, and hangs out a lot with Carolyn Kaiser, who operates the Poodle Factory, a dog-grooming salon a couple doors down from Barnegat Books. For a living, Bernie steals things. He's a burglar, and no Raffles-style amateur cracksman either. He's a pro, and he does it for the money plus the undeniable thrill he gets out of it. He knows all this is morally reprehensible but there's nothing he can do about it.

Matthew Scudder's an ex-cop. Once a moderately corrupt New York police detective, Scudder went through changes when a bullet of his ricocheted and killed a young girl. He left his wife