I’ve been having fun using the Behind the Name site to generate names for characters recently. When I wrote my first chapter for my Bratislava novel, I needed a Slovak girl’s name, a Korean boy’s name and an English girl’s name, and after plugging that information into the website and clicking a few times to reject the first suggestions, I found names that suited, without having to use names of people I know – I find it hard to separate a character from a real person if I’ve used the name of someone I know!

But while I was generating names, I was very careful to try for names that are normal. I have a real problem with abnormal names and in 99% of cases I don’t think they have a place in fictions. They also don’t have a place in real life, even though I read today that some parent named their child Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii. Eek. This was in New Zealand – which says to me that the same thing could happen in Australia – but the poor child (who’s 9 now) went to court to be allowed to change her name, and won. According to the report:

Judge Murfitt added that he was dismayed at New Zealand’s trend of parents giving their children wacky names.

Kids have been called Number 16 Bus Shelter, Midnight Chardonnay and Violence. But officials did block Sex Fruit, Yeah Detroit, Stallion and Cinderella Beauty Blossom.

One couple had a bid to call their twin children Fish and Chips blocked but the names Benson and Hedges for twins were allowed.

I’m dangerously close to beginning my rant on how some parents should be shot for the names they give their children, but I’m going to make a big effort not to and instead return my thoughts to choosing names in fiction. My big take-away point here: I’ll strive to choose names that are memorable, but not too unusual, unless the character is particularly unusual. My feelings about what kind of person has a particular name will differ from my readers. More important, I discovered while choosing names for characters in my Japanese novel, is giving the characters names that are easily differentiated – nothing worse than reading a book where you get confused about who’s who.

As I was driving along the coast today – inspired, perhaps, by the fantastic view over the Indian Ocean to Rottnest Island – I was listening to some new music on the radio. I’ve got no idea who the band was, and that doesn’t really matter – the point is, as always I was paying the most attention to the lyrics, and in this song they were particularly, well, lyrical!

Somewhere on a long list of lifetime goals I know I’ve got “write some song lyrics” written down. So I got thinking about how I would go about writing song lyrics, and came to the conclusion that my writing brain is not up to the challenge right now – or at least it would need a lot of practice. But that kind of practice could be exactly what I need. I often think that my fiction writing is not lyrical or beautiful enough, and I admire writers who write in a style that I consider “beautiful” (although of course that’s an entirely subjective thing).

From song lyrics my brain wandered to poetry, despite the fact that I’ve recently learnt that poets die young. Poetry is something I like to read to observe beautiful words and phrases, and it sometimes inspires me to write better. But my next challenge to myself is to try and write some of my own poetry. Definitely not for publication, but for practice, and to see if that helps my fiction writing sound better.

Any poets out there? Do you think this will help?

Recently, I haven’t been too good at being one of those writers who always has a notebook to hand and can get some writing done whenever a spare moment presents itself. When I was living the travelling life, I was much better at this, and wrote things on buses or in queues or while waiting for really slow service in a cheap restaurant. But in the last year or two I pretty much only write if I’m sitting at my computer.

With one exception that I only just noticed: Friday mornings. I teach ESL to adults two and a half days a week at the moment and every Friday morning, for the first ninety-minute lesson, I’m required to give them a test on what they’ve covered that week. While they’re quietly working away, I have a chance to do some work too, and I usually plan the schedule for the following week and do any other paperwork that’s required. Which takes about ten minutes. And then I get bored.

In recent weeks, it’s become a bit of a habit for me to use this time to write. Because of the need to be present in the classroom (and aware enough of a student who needs help), and perhaps also because of the cold winter weather, I’ve taken to grabbing some scrap paper, leaning on a textbook and walking around the room writing. Sometimes I pause at the window to write a few longer sentences, sometimes I actually write as I walk. It seems to be a very therapeutic way of getting some ideas down (but without neglecting my students – don’t worry, boss!).

I’ve produced ideas for my novel, plus posts for various blogs, via this walking and writing method. It’s a bit of a surprise for me that it works so well. Perhaps I should set my students solo work more often and take advantage of this quiet, productive time!

Do any of you write in unusual places or unusual ways?

Something Louise Doughty said at the Perth Writers Festival earlier this year has really stuck with me, and still disturbs me a little bit. I hope time hasn’t altered my memory of what she actually said, but it was definitely something along the lines of being a writer who doesn’t collect her ideas on random bits of paper. I thought we all did!

As I remember it, Doughty said that she’s not one of those writers who keeps a journal with lots of ideas and snippets of fiction. She doesn’t write anything down unless she’s actually working on a novel. And the reason, if I remember rightly, is because she thinks that if she writes it down first, the freshness is lost and the idea is never the same again. On top of that, she believes she never really loses or forgets her good ideas.

It’s an interesting point of view but I’d be absolutely paranoid about losing my best ideas. I know already that I lose ideas – things I think of in the shower or lying in bed that I’m unable to write down at the time – although I don’t know for sure if they’re actually good ideas. But they could be, and I certainly do use ideas that I’ve written in odd places later on. Sometimes the very act of writing them down is enough that I then remember them when it’s relevant to what I’m writing, but without keeping notes – in a journal, in my diary or a sticky note – I can’t believe that everything would still be present in my brain.

Having said that, I am often surprised about the odd kinds of details and ideas that jump into my mind just when I need them, while I’m writing. A snippet of conversation I overhead years ago, or the kind of shirt that someone wore on a TV show, or whatever else I need to fill a gap in a story I’m writing, all seem to appear with fantastic timing. I’m getting myself tangled up now – perhaps Louise Doughty really has a point. Yet I’m not confident enough about that to stop jotting down ideas when I’m able to. What about you?

I’ve got a square Post-It note on the pin-up board above my desk that’s a little bit overflowing with writing-related paraphernalia. Luckily, though, since one of my cats developed an obsession with drawing pins, she’s managed to pull down a lot of the stuff I didn’t need any more (along with some sharp pointy drawing pins that I’ve found her chewing away on at times, and chased her round the house to retrieve. She has a death wish).

Anyway, since she removed one layer of junk, this Post-It note has become highly visible again after a few months of hibernation. It’s a note I made after reading some blog post somewhere – actually I suspect it’s from Men With Pens when they were doing a lot of fiction writing posts. The note says:

Choose one thing to write today, and write it well.
My addition: this should be writing that I’m not getting paid for.

I really liked this idea at the time, and think it’s important for my fiction writing, but I’ve never stuck to it. However, since my work has become so computer-based I’ve lost the habit of journalling those tiny fiction writing ideas or prompts that still do jump into my head. For example, just now I thought of a strange conversation I had with a colleague at school this morning about what his wife said and what she really meant, and it seems like there’s much more of a story in that. This is the kind of thing I’d like to do some free-writing or fiction extract kind of writing about each day – this is the kind of thing I could choose to write every day, and write well. And on days when I have enough time to get some really “serious” fiction writing done, then I can be sure I write that well, too.

That’s my resolution, from today, to write one thing every day, and to write it well. Fiction. Good fiction. A bit of a novel, or a bit of a short story, or a bit of something that could turn into either. Even though I have times where relatively good fiction flows out of me, I’m still somehow out of practice, and can’t always write “beautifully”, and this should help. So I’ll keep that sticky note in front of me – thanks to my cat for uncovering it!

Next day edit: The cat decided to pull down that Post-It note last night and I’ve just found it face down on the floor underneath my desk. Hope this is not a sign of things to come for this resolution.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve started out writing this second novel using three different first person voices. When I wrote my first novel, it started out being in first person but then I rewrote it in third person (limited). All I keep thinking is this – why couldn’t language just have one possibility for voice, so I wouldn’t have to um and ah about which voice I choose to write in?

I thought I should try and break this down a bit for myself, to see if that can help make it clear how I can use the different voices best, for my situation, stories and style. So let’s start with the downsides:

Problems with first person: One of the reasons I didn’t like my first novel being written in first person was it sounded too much like the narrator was really me. Perhaps I just need more experience to find a good stylistic voice, but that’s the main reason I rewrote in third person. Of course, the other obvious limitation is that you can really only talk about the experiences and point of view of one character at a time, but my third person rewrite had this fairly limited perspective anyway.

Problems with third person: When I rewrote my first novel I got so tangled up with trying to avoid using the characters’ names ten times in one sentence. Using too many he and she pronouns isn’t much better. That problem seems to vanish with first person. Plus I sometimes feel like the third person is too detached, or it feels artificial to hear about a character’s thoughts or emotions.

What does this mean for me? Heck, I’m just a beginner, I don’t know. But I will keep trying to write this Bratislava novel in first person. Because there are three different characters, each of whom gets their own turn at telling parts of the story, that overcomes the limitation of only knowing one point of view. And so far, I think I’ve been able to give each character their own voice. Whether or not I can keep those voices up (and sufficiently different) for an entire novel remains to be seen.

Sometimes I really regret that I didn’t study creative writing at university. I was really encouraged to write throughout primary school, and in early high school a couple of teachers were also quite complimentary about my writing skills. But as university choices loomed ever closer, and I was able to get good grades in other subjects too, then my teachers steered my career choices towards “practical” subjects and I ended up studying mathematics.

Of course, everything in life happens for a reason, and if I hadn’t studied maths, I wouldn’t have worked in maths education, and then segued into teacher training, and finally (if in a somewhat backwards fashion) become a teacher, which I love. Now that I’m teaching English as a second language, it seems to have a good connection with being creative, with language and with being inspired, so it’s a perfect set-up.

Just the same, I wonder if I’m missing a whole skill set in creative writing that can only be acquired at university, and I’ve been contemplating doing a Masters in Creative Writing. And I’m still contemplating this, despite reading a scathing attack from one of my favourite writers about creative writing courses: Hanif Kureishi has called university creative writing courses the new mental hospitals. He says, quite correctly in my opinion, that you can’t grade creative writing (and says he always gives students 71%!), and thinks that completing an undergraduate creative writing course sets up false expectations for students that a career will naturally follow.

I’d be interested to know his opinion on postgraduate creative courses for students who’ve already got some writing experience. I’ve been exploring options like an MA (Creative Writing) at UWA or an MA (Creative Arts) at ECU … but I’m still not really sure if that’s the direction I’ll go.

Remember how I’m the queen of procrastination? Well, not long after I discovered the Titlescorer website, I read a post on the Writer’s Technology Companion blog about a website that generated random names that you could use for your characters. I checked it out but was disappointed to see it was only going to spit out English names, not very useful for a lot of my stories and also for the novel I’m working on, because in the same way my world is populated by multiple nationalities, so is my fiction.

So I hunted a little further and found some gems. It’s incredible that some of these sites exist and it’s terrible that I spend time playing around with them when I should be writing, but they could be useful to me at some stage, or to a reader … Anyway my current favourite name generating site (yes, there are many) is Behind the Name which has the facility to randomly generate masculine, feminine or ambiguous names for almost 60 nationalities, along with names from mythology or ancient times.

This is so much more exciting than just looking up a list of typical names for particular nationalities. It’s a game! A little scary at times though. I just asked it to generate a random English girl’s name and it came up with Coretta Edytha Devan Keshia. Probably not a name I’ll use next time I need one, but thanks anyone. For the record, other random hits seemed more believable.