Choosing character names that sing to the reader

‘Be like a polished stone; don’t give them anything to hang onto.’

That was the inspiration behind my choice of name for one of the bad guys in By the Light of a Lie; he of the carefully constructed false identity. Not who he appears but no chinks in his armour. The quote was supposedly from Richard Nixon which stuck in my magpie brain although I can’t track it down anywhere. Nixon certainly knew about lying, one of the essentials in his political toolkit, viz his advice to a young associate. ‘If you can't lie, you'll never go anywhere.’

Do names matter? Writers agonise over them for days, change their minds half way through and have to laboriously replace them. Do they need to be evocative? Names with no connotations over time (with great success) take on a life of their own – Harry Potter immediately opens up a world of witches and warlocks. Jack Reacher is the guy who solves problems the quick n’ easy way with a gun. Amazon did invoke a feel of immense spread (world’s largest river) and aggression (female warriors) but seemed a strange choice initially for online selling. Now it’s gone into common usage, and like a swear word, it has lost its original resonance.

Stones intrigue me – hard, bleak, dark, enduring; only the extreme heat of volcanos can rent them apart; or, over aeons of time water which wears them away. They preserve memories of days long past with mummified fossils. And through their surprisingly porous molecular structure, they can also, according to Don Robbins’ theories*, trap event memory like a natural video recorder, producing ghost-like sightings. [*The Secret Language of Stone.]

Without getting too Manichean about it, despite or maybe because of their Luciferian and Saturnian nature they are a necessary component to life. In more Jungian terms, you can’t have the light without the shadow. The eternal battle between good and evil can be symbolised as stone versus fire (inspiration/creativity) and water (emotion).

The old alchemists whose purpose was to turn lead into gold, either literally or spiritually, said at the end of the process there would be a residue of base material which had no hope of transformation. They called it the ‘Terra Damnata’, which they threw away. Yet even waste dross survives. An indestructible paradox.

Crime novels always in vogue

Ian Rankin of Rebus fame (I’m a great fan) suggests crime novels are going out of fashion given the bleakness of the news. Respectfully I’d disagree. There’s no sign of audiences for murder mysteries in books or TV series/films diminishing.

   There’s a place for soft, feel-good books but given the state of the world, focussing on gritty, realistic subjects feels more in tune with the times. And crime novels, despite being looked down on by the literati, do reflect and often illuminate matters of serious social concern - people trafficking, honour killings, corporate misbehaviour, illegal drug testing and the like. As real crime diversifies and escalates, so does the need for understanding – and there’s no better way of getting the message across in palatable form than in fiction and drama.

  My newly published By the Light of a Lie tugs away the veil of respectability which cloaks the secrets of public figures; touches on child abuse and the manipulation of memory; and hints at a long overdue dialogue about the paranormal and astrology.  All, I hope, wrapped up in a rollicking adventure.

www.marjorie.com @ByLightofLie   
The Gold Dagger Award

How to cook up a successful novel - joke.

If you’re comfortable with words and organised, writing non-fiction is easy. The end result may not set the world on fire, but the doing of it is a simple matter of sorting out chapter headings and writing bite-sized essays to fit, one after the other. A linear, left-brain process.

 Writing novels is whole different ballgame - what one writer described as wrestling with a jelly(fish) and most often the jelly wins. Every novelist approaches it in a different way. Some start with a flash of an idea, a poignant human dilemma, and allow their muse to sweep them along on a magic, mystery tour into the unknown. I’ve a drawer full of unfinished novels that started thus; one of them swallowed me up in its darkness before chapter 6, others stuttered to a confused halt. 

 The other approach is to sort out the goodie bag in advance. 1. Story content – even if it’s a murder, find corpse find killer book, nowadays it needs a context. Global best-seller The Dinosaur Feather plunged the reader deep into paleontology; Mark Billingham’s Love like Blood into honour killings; Abir Mukherjee’s A Necessary Evil, a witty historical dip into old Raj India. Content dictates setting. Where, when and how best to tell the story. Robert Harris (sigh) always a genius storyteller, brilliantly evoked the horror of Pompeii through the eyes of a young water engineer who knew when the aqueducts stopped flowing that destruction was imminent.

  2. Characters – that you actually like, even if they’re reprehensible anti-heroes, since you’ll have to live with them probably for several years. Names can gum you up for days. Stick to them; if you change half way through it’s a real grind to replace. Always (memo to self) keep names of minor characters on file, since you’ll forget by chapter 28 what they’re called.

 3. Plot structure – read voraciously the Star Wars format - call to arms, dream stage, complications, crisis, resolution. Can you jam your story content, context, characters into the winding maze of a formula for success? Left brain applauds; right brain feels claustrophobic - too much like painting by numbers. Compromise – lay out map with permission to go off track as whim dictates.

 Then holding all of the above in your head, as well as coping with the money-earning day job, a mountain of domestic trivia and mandatory dog walking, you’re ready to go. Message to brain – construct a nuclear bunker where novel lives, breathes and can be ready to activate at the flick of a switch. Hah. Order more post-it notes.