Have you ever heard a strange or beautiful or hilarious name and thought, "That sounds like a character in a book"? Sometimes a story comes first and the author has to name its characters. But sometimes a character pops into the imagination with a marvelous name already attached and demands to be put in a story.
This week, brainstorm character names in a notebook. Get as wild and crazy and creative as you want. For inspiration, you can flip through a baby name book for ideas, or look at place names on a map, or an old phone book if you can still find one lying around somewhere, or look in a dictionary for ordinary words that could be made into name (like Persimmony Smudge—Persimmony is just a "persimmon" fruit with a "y" on the end, and Smudge is, well, a smudge). Play with the names and words you find and chop them up, rearrange them, add or subtract letters, and invent new names. Do they sound like heroes or villains, clowns or adventurers, tragic characters or happy ones?
Out of all those new names you made up, see which one of them steps forward and calls out to you, "Hey! Hey, writer! I have a story to tell! Listen!" Then, listen . . . and write.
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Children's Book Writer, Artist, and Teacher
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