I wrote some of this blog wearing a hairband.

I think I've always thought names were something quite important. When I was younger, I'd always wish I was called something else, and often try to get something to catch on, even up until I was in the first year of high school I tried to get people to call me by my middle name.


But as a writer, oddly I've never thought or worried about naming characters that much, up until tonight. The first serious thing I wrote was my NaNoWriMo novel in 2009, and seeing as I was making it up as I went along, and it was set in the present day, in a mundane town in England, my characters names were Tom and Sam and Matthew and Jack, nothing exotic or out there, and the same happened for last year's Script Frenzy.

I think for the last thing I wrote (yes I'm trying to sell Walls to you some more;) ) my character's names were more special and exciting, though I didn't really mean them to be. My characters this time became more colourful, and with them so did their names. Something really special happened involving this: one character's a huge fan of David Bowie is in love with a girl named Janine (partly named after the IAMX bass/synth-ist) , and until somebody told me later on I had no idea David Bowie has a song called "Janine". Maybe it's fate.


But currently I'm in that stage of planning out something before heading into writing it, and it's strongly based around some people I know, so what I'm doing really is renaming. And it's unbelievably hard to find a new name for a friend when they already have one, especially when it suits them to the point that it becomes a part of them.
I've tried to do some kind-of tricks, for example using meanings - for one character I used behindthename.com to look up meanings for words like strong and red and fire, and also used birthdays as internation naming days, which my French exchange partner taught me about, as we don't have them here, and it turned out her naming day is my birthday.
On top of one of my best friends and some other people I was quite close with a while back, I also had to re-name myself, which was actually really hard. Because there's those names you feel you'd like to be called, though just for a while, like Lolita or Persephone, then there's obvious ones, like maybe a middle name or the name of a relative or something. But then I thought of another way and I think I have a name now. Maybe.

I don't know what the point of that was.

- lizzie