Top Ten Literary Names (I’d Give My Children)

Dear Future Husband, we can vote on this. Love, Em.

I saw this on someone else’s blog, and at first I thought it was silly, but then I started thinking about it, and – well, here’s the result.

After all, it’s pretty obvious that I would contemplate doing this, isn’t it?

In alphabetical order:

1. Antony after “Mark Antony” from William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra


Marlon Brando as Antony in Julius Caesar (1953)

I will not nerd out about Shakespeare, I will not nerd out about Shakespeare –
Antony might not be our main focus in Julius Caesar, but he’s a wonderfully written character. I’ve loved this character ever since I read Julius Caesar in Mrs. Terri’s Language Arts class in the tenth grade. (The fact that I thought Marlon Brando was rather attractive as Antony might have helped the 15 year old me appreciate the character all the more.)

2. Blythe after “Gilbert Blythe” from Lucy M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series



Jonathan Crombie as Gilbert Blythe in Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story (1999)

[A]ll pioneers are considered to be afflicted with moonstruck madness. (Anne of the Island)

I’ve said before that I love the character Gilbert Blythe, but I don’t love the name “Gilbert.”

However, Blythe is nice, and it means “joyous,” so that’s good. I think it would make a good girl’s name, or maybe a boy’s middle name.

3. Cal or Caleb after “Caleb Trask” from John Steinbeck’s East of Eden



James Dean as Cal in East of Eden (1955)

Everyone should read EOE, and if you can’t get through all 601 pages of it, then watch the film. James Dean is extraordinary. Yes, the novel is full of allusions to the Genesis accounts of Adam, Eve, Cain and Able, and yes, Cal is a Cain-like figure, but he’s so terribly likable. I just thought he was a beautiful character.

4. Catherine after “Catherine Morland” from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey



Felicity Jones as Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey (2007)

[I]f adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.

We will not call her “Cathy.” Ew. All I’d ever think about is that silly comic strip.

5. Edmund after “Edmund Pevensie” from C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia



Skandar Keynes as Edmund Pevensie in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005)

“But who is Aslan? Do you know him?”
“Well — he knows me,” said Edmund.
(The Voyage of the Dawn Treader)

Hands down favorite character C.S. Lewis ever wrote. He’s brilliant.

6. Keats after poet John Keats



Ben Whishaw as John Keats in Bright Star (2009)

You speak of Lord Byron and me; there is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees, I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task.

Dear Future Husband, a tip: I really like John Keats. If you want to win me over, read his poetry and letters.

And yes, I’d seriously consider this as a first name. Don’t judge: I discovered last week that one of my grandfather’s uncles was called Holmes Harris. Yeah, that’s right – Holmes. I could have included that in this list.

7. Lucy after “Lucy Pevensie” from C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia



Georgie Henley as Lucy Pevensie in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005)

I think—I don’t know—but I think I could be brave enough. (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe)

The name “Lucy” means light, and she’s another fantastic character by Lewis.

8. Royal after “Royal Wilder” from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series



Laura and Almanzo Wilder

Obscure character choice? Yes, indeed, because I love both of the Wilder brothers, but I’m not mean enough to name my son “Almanzo.”

9. Scout after “Jean Louise ‘Scout’ Finch” from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird



Mary Badham as Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.

Who doesn’t love Scout?

10. Wendy after “Wendy Moira Angela Darling” from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan



Wendy from Peter Pan (1953)

‘For Wendy?’ John said, aghast. ‘Why, she is only a girl!’

‘That,’ explained Curly, ‘is why we are her servants.’

I know some people think that Wendy is a bit bossy, mothering, and annoying. Sounds like the ultimate big sister to me.

Judging from this list, I expect my future children to be intellectual, curious, adventurous, loyal, and concerned about their fellow man.

Oh, that’s a lot a pressure on me, isn’t it?

Oh, and the four names I would like to give my children but never will because I couldn’t possibly be that mean to them? Benedick from William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Dickon from Francis Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, Holmes from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and Huck from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I taught high school – I know what type of nicknames my children would end up having if I gave them these names. And if I didn’t know, I have heard what Benedict Cumberbatch’s classmates used to call him, (WARNING: that clip is funny but NSFW) and I just can’t do that to someone. (Granted, “Benedict Cumberbatch” is a very weird name, but…)

I Love A Good Meme.

30 Day NaNoWriMo Meme

Day 1 – Have you participated in NaNoWriMo before? If so, which years and what end result? If not (or even if so, for that matter), what’s your connection to writing? Why do you want to participate this year?

Day 2 – What’s the title of your story? Why did you choose the name you did?

Day 3 – Pick one of your female characters. Introduce your readers to her, from her point of view and her words only.

Day 4 – What genre is your novel? Why did you pick it?

Day 5 – Name two songs from your playlist that you feel are connected with your novel in some way, and explain how they are.

Day 6 – What is your one biggest stressor related to forcing yourself to write at least 50,000 words in a span of 30 days?

Day 7 – Where’s your favorite place to hunker down and write?

Day 8 – List your current, most up-to-date word count. Are you satisfied with your progress thus far?

Day 9 – Have you told anyone else you’re doing NaNo this year? Who? What was their reaction?

Day 10 – How does your love of writing manifest in non-NaNo months?

Day 11 – Ever tried collaborative writing (such as play-by-post roleplaying)? If so, what do you think of it?

Day 12 – Imagine you’re behind in your word count goals (even if you’re not) and are going to pull an all-nighter to catch up. Screencap a playlist of inspirational music you would use to get you up to speed.

Day 13 – Name a male character from your novel. Describe him through the point of view and words of the female character you introduced in question 3 (if they never interact, pick another female character).

Day 14 – Is the sexuality of your characters a large part of your novel’s story? If so, are there characters who deviate from the heterosexual “norm”? In what way?

Day 15 – Do any of your characters have a disability or mental illness? If so, how does that affect their development throughout your story?

Day 16 – At around the half-way point, it bears mentioning that most of us wrimos have other obligations beside simply hitting that elusive word count. What else do you have going on in your life (work, school, children, neurotic pets, etc.), and just how much are you shafting it to win NaNo?

Day 17 – In what time period is your novel set? Is it in this world or another?

Day 18 – Who is the antagonist in your novel? What drives their actions?

Day 19 – Which authors or books have inspired your own writing the most, and why?

Day 20 – If you could meet one fictional character from any book you’ve ever read, who would it be, and why?

Day 21 – With about 10 days left to this arguably traumatic experience, what are your plans and goals for your novel, should you successfully complete it?

Day 22 – If you’ve participated in or won NaNo before, what happened to your other novel efforts? Still in the revision process/querying publishers/scrapped it immediately/etc.

Day 23 – Do animals play any part in your story? If so, how do they add to it?

Day 24 – Is religion featured in your novel at all? If so, which ones? If it’s/they’re your own creations, describe it/them and how it/they play(s) a part in your characters’ lives.

Day 25 – What are the names of at least two of your main characters? How did you choose their names?

Day 26 – Was any research involved (historical or otherwise) in your NaNo prep?

Day 27 – What’s your word count now? Are you satisfied with your progress or panicked that you won’t have enough time to finish by November 30?

Day 28 – Name one thing you shafted all month in favor of participating in NaNo.

Day 29 – Name one thing in which you indulged as a treat to keep yourself motivated and writing that you wouldn’t otherwise have done.

Day 30 – Share a link to either your NaNo profile or a location on the internet where your story can be found. If someone offered to beta read for you, would you be willing to do the same for them during the subsequent editing process?

(This was created by someone whose screenname on tumblr is ‘matokah’.)

Rules for Writing

The life of a writer is severely romanticized which can be rather disheartening.

The Guardian published an article called “Ten Rules for Writing Fiction” in 2010, in which several published authors gave their advice on how to write.

Here are some of my favorites.

Elmore Leonard

“[I]f it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

“Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.”

“Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But “said” is far less intrusive than “grumbled”, “gasped”, “cautioned”, “lied”. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated” and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.”

“Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”, what do the “Ameri­can and the girl with him” look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story.”

Margaret Atwood

1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.

3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.

4 If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ­memory stick.

“Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.”

“Prayer might work. Or reading ­something else. Or a constant visual­isation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.”

Roddy Doyle

“Do not place a photograph of your ­favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.”

“Do give the work a name as quickly as possible. Own it, and see it. Dickens knew Bleak House was going to be called Bleak House before he started writing it. The rest must have been easy.”

Helen Dunmore

“Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don’t yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.”

“Read Keats’s letters.”

Esther Freud

“Cut out the metaphors and similes. In my first book I promised myself I wouldn’t use any and I slipped up ­during a sunset in chapter 11. I still blush when I come across it.”

Neil Gaiman

1 Write.

2 Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

3 Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

4 Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.

5 Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

6 Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

7 Laugh at your own jokes.

8 The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

David Hare

“Never complain of being misunderstood. You can choose to be understood, or you can choose not to.”

“The two most depressing words in the English language are “literary fiction”.”

PD James

“Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.”

Al Kennedy

“Remember you love writing. It wouldn’t be worth it if you didn’t. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back.”

“Remember writing doesn’t love you. It doesn’t care. Nevertheless, it can behave with remarkable generosity. Speak well of it, encourage others, pass it on.”

Hilary Mantel

“First paragraphs can often be struck out. Are you performing a haka, or just shuffling your feet?”

Michael Morpurgo

“Ted Hughes gave me this advice and it works wonders: record moments, fleeting impressions, overheard dialogue, your own sadnesses and bewilderments and joys.”

Helen Simpson

“The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-it on the wall in front of my desk saying “Faire et se taire” (Flaubert), which I translate for myself as “Shut up and get on with it.””

Rose Tremain

“When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats’s idea of Negative Capability and Kipling’s advice to “drift, wait and obey”. Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being.”

“In the planning stage of a book, don’t plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.”

The Guardian, “Ten Rules for Writing Fiction,” Part I [Source]
The Guardian, “Ten Rules for Writing Fiction,” Part II [Source]

Join Team Emily

I’ve wanted to be a great many things since I was a small child. I wanted to be a singer, an actress, an astronaut, a scientist, Indiana Jones, and Princess Leia. However, when each of those dreams eventually gave up the ghost for various reasons, I discovered that there was one constant love in my life:

Writing.

I’ve mentioned on this blog before that before I’m thirty, I want to write a novel and publish it. At least one novel, just something that could have my name on it, and that I could look at and say, “You see this? I created this.”

When I quit my job at AIS last academic year, one goal that I gave myself was to start my novel. Not finish it, but at least start it. Now, here I am many moons later, and while I have been writing, I’ve realized that writing a novel can’t happen if I don’t have perseverance.

I’ve got a lot of stories, I know, but I tend to get bored halfway through the third page. Or I think, No one will ever read this! It’s far too melodramatic or cheesy or just plain stupid.

Or I watch I go to the movies and watch as someone else tells the story that I thought was my own original idea, and I think, Well, you can’t write that one now. Someone’s already gone and done it.

I’m the type of person who needs deadlines. I work much better when there is someone or something to put pressure on me.

Today, I discovered something very cool: November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The purpose of NaNoWriMo is for writers to sit down and type out a 50,000-word novel during the month of November.

It’s a very wonderful idea, and its designed to help people to just write:

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. This approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.
Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down. [Source]

Now, here’s where you come in: I want to participate in this, but I need cheerleaders. I have no idea what I’m going to write – to be honest, it could be quite appalling – but I want someone to keep me accountable.

Thus, I’ve created a blog for this project. Emily Writes a Novel will feature daily posts by me – aren’t I ambitious? – of my rough draft.

FYI: In order to write 50,000 words in 30 days, I have to write 1,666.67 words a day. Some days, that will be too little. Other days, I’ll be barely able to write a sentence.

I want you to tear it apart. Leave no stone unturned. Rip it to shreds and critique it until I find myself sobbing in a dark corner.

Okay, I don’t really, but you get my point. I want people to read this who are interested in helping me fulfill this dream.

I don’t care who you are, a literature professor or the short order cook, I just want someone in my corner.

All posts will be password protected. This is because – obviously – I’d rather no one steal my ideas and make them better. If you would like to participate, I’d ask that you message me either through Facebook or Twitter, and I will provide you with the password that you need.

(If you have it, you can also message me at my personal email account. I’d just rather not give out that information here.)

I would also like to add that if you’re interested in doing this, too, I’d love to help you as well. Whether you keep yours on a blog or just in a composition book, I would love to read it and offer critiques, advice, and encouragement.

My new blog for this project can be found here.

If you would like more information about NaNoWriMo, check out the website here.

Also, I’ll be trying to stretch my writing muscles by writing daily from now until November 1. I’m not sure if I’ll post here every day, but you can count on seeing new entries here these next few weeks.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave a comment. Also, if you’re interested in doing this as well, let me know!

Challenge Accepted!

Challenge: Write your autobiography in a seven-word sentence.

The pages in my passport are stamped.

Any takers?