Overthinking and second-guessing character names

~ Carrie-Anne ~ 1 Comment

One of the odds and sods I saved for the last two drafts of A Dream Deferred was mulling over whether or not to change a few names, or if I even needed to mention characters who won’t appear or get any lines until the fifth book.

The name I most went back and forth about, even during the first draft, was Emilia vs. Emma for Vasya and Dusya’s third child, born December 1949. Since their other two girls are Stella and Nora, I really wanted to keep the two-syllable theme, plus a classic name that wasn’t so common in that era. (The traditional Russian spelling is Emiliya, but they chose the more familiar English form.)

I opted against Emma because I already have three others elsewhere. Additionally, it seems kind of odd for my Estonian characters to call someone Emma when Ema is what they call their mothers. (Surprisingly, despite this seeming dealbreaker, Emma is a popular name in contemporary Estonia!)

There’s no rule that says every name MUST follow the same style. Stella, Nora, and Emilia still go well together, and I’ve really cooled to Emma after its massive explosion in popularity and being Top 4 since 2002. (I genuinely don’t understand why so many people jumped on this name just because it was used on the Friends baby! Think outside of pop culture, dammit!)

Had I changed Emilia to Emma, I then would’ve had to find another two-syllable classic name that works in both English and Russian for their final child. None of the names on the 1952 Top 1000 felt quite right, so I named that last baby Adela. I looked again for a replacement later, after it dawned on me that Adela rhymes with Stella, but names like Alma and Lula just weren’t jiving with me for that particular character and family. Adela and Stella also don’t rhyme exactly, not like, say, Della and Stella. (My original plan was to make their last child a boy named Grigor, after his grandfather Grigoriy, but I’m moving away from the trope of a lone boy after several girls.)

Fedya and Novomira’s surprise third baby was originally named Serena, after the elderly nun who counselled Lyuba in the first book and then gave comforting advice to Novomira during this stressful, unhappy time in her life (beyond just being pregnant unexpectedly). But after I edited that scene out as pointless clutter, the name didn’t feel right anymore.

Since she’s born on Bright Monday, the day after Easter, I changed it to Renata and had Novomira saying she chose it because it means “rebirth” and is very symbolic to the holiday, plus it goes well with her other kids’ names (Feliks and Lyubov, called Busya). That way, Renya could remain her nickname.

Renata didn’t feel 100% right to me, so I repeatedly looked up lists of names for babies born on Easter and in the spring. I then changed it to Anfisa, which means “blooming,” but it doesn’t really have the same symbolism, in addition to seeming a bit out of place. I began thinking about an Estonian name with an Easter-relevant meaning, like Halja (verdant), but I wasn’t jiving with any other names.

Renata it remains, even if Renya is also the nickname of Regina Ushakova and one of Inessa Zyuganova’s cousins-in-law. It’s not like I have no other characters with the same name or nickname.

Next I went back and forth about the names of Hestia Areti’s younger siblings, who won’t appear until the fifth book. She originally names them as Circe, Athena, Pandora, Xanthe, and Leander, though she later says her father, Judge Areti, feels very strongly about using the proper Greek forms of names instead of Latinate versions. Thus, Circe and Leander are out!

I changed the names and their birth order several times before finally just removing that line entirely. The only ones I’m set on are Eunomia, Athena, and Persephone (currently my #1 fave name if I have a daughter).

I also repeatedly changed the names of Zofia Kwaśniewska and Katarina Zyuganova’s daughters, and looked through lists of awesome Polish and Belarusian women from history as namesakes (both firsts and middles). So much effort for characters who ended up only appearing as bridesmaids late in Part IV!

I’d settled on Emilia for Zofia’s younger daughter, after Emilia Plater (a national shero of Poland), but then worried about having two Emilias, even if they’re a decade apart. Since I couldn’t decide 100%, I removed all of them from the Cast of Characters and just mentioned Zofia and Katarina’s children being in the wedding party. If I don’t give the name Narkissa or Narkiza to Nelya Savvina’s firstborn in the fifth book, I’m strongly leaning towards naming Zofia’s younger daughter Narcyza, after writer and feminist icon Narcyza Żmichowska.

I felt really stupid when I very belatedly looked up the supposed Belarusian name Kista and discovered it’s not a name at all, but the word for “cyst” in the Eastern Slavic languages and Bulgarian. This is one of Inessa’s cousins, who’s only mentioned in passing in the prior books. It also turns out some of her other cousins’ names, which I found on Kabalarians in 2001, have Ukrainian and Russian spellings. Though that can be explained by the parents’ illiteracy and near-total lack of education. Non-Belarusian friends or priests could’ve registered the births and baptisms, and used the spellings from their own languages.

I tried changing her full name to Kasimira, with the nickname Kasya, but that didn’t feel right. Katsyaryna/Katsya is too close to Katarina/Katya, the sibling right before her, even considering there are two other pairs with different versions of the same name (Yuliya/Ulyana and Kseniya/Oksana). The only substitute that worked for me was Kristina/Kistya. Kisa and Kisya are pet names meaning “kitty,” and she could’ve mispronounced her name as Kistina and gotten the nickname Kista as a young child. Her uneducated family wouldn’t have known that word means “cyst.” Upon discovering this, she’d switch to Kistya.

I already have a Kristina who goes by Krisya and a Krystyna called Krysia, so using a different diminutive is common sense.

Mireena Kalvik’s firstborn was originally named Kaira, but it began bugging me how close it sounds to her niece Kaja’s name. I changed it to Halja, but that didn’t feel 100% right. After playing with a few other Estonian names, I settled on Sigrid, called Siiri. It might not be a native Estonian name, but it’s just the kind of name Mireena would choose.

Lessons learnt from five drafts of a 1.5M-word book that had six hiatuses, Part II

~ Carrie-Anne ~ 4 Comments

After over ten and a half years, it’s finally over. My original projections of a 400K wordcount, seven major storylines, and maybe two years for the first draft were soon left far behind in the dust as more and more new storylines piled on and became so tightly entwined with the overall story. I also made the huge mistake of stuffing in a half-baked, bloated storyline to nowhere about moving back to NYC late in Part III, and then increased the wordcount (despite all the cuts I made in return) by adding in a lot of new chapters and sections during the third draft. It’s very telling those new chapters don’t go past about the 6K range and were written much more carefully and tightly than the first draft chapters as long as short novellas!

I made so many mistakes and learnt so many lessons along the way. It’s embarrassing how I devolved as a writer while muddling through this mess, but at least I managed to pull a coherent, consistent book out of it in the end.

12. You don’t need to show every single thing your characters do! There were so many scenes I abandoned in media res, and scenes I planned but decided against, since they contributed nothing important to plot, character, or setting development. Chapter 197, “A New Life in Riverdale,” had a lot of this clutter cut, with only the most foundational sections retained.

13. When there are too many simultaneous storylines, you’ll necessarily need more words for both the book and individual chapters. Too many chapters’ wordcounts climbed into five digits, the length of short novellas, when normally I only go above 10,000 for very select chapters whose storylines merit that much verbiage. I didn’t expect Part I to balloon up to 481K in the first draft, yet I couldn’t mentally connect that to having to be more judicious going forward!

14. Before adding or getting too far into an unplanned new storyline, think through how important this really is to the overall story and how difficult (even impossible) it might be to “just” delete it or move it into the next book once it’s been fully developed and tightly entwined with multiple other story threads. Why do you NEED to pile in yet another plotline when there are already so many others?

15. The more storylines there are, the more words you’ll need to fully develop them and see them all to their natural conclusions. They all seemed like great ideas at the time, natural developments in these characters’ lives at this specific time, but I didn’t think ahead to how they’d bloat the wordcount even higher when I was already so cognizant of having sailed past the million-word mark.

16. The final part of a book is NOT the place to start introducing a whole slew of new plotlines and characters! You’re supposed to wind everything down towards their dénouements and tie all the storylines together, not bloat the book up with long, complicated dramas and development of new characters. The few I retained were significantly edited down, and kept only because they’re not totally unrelated to prior developments.

17. If a late-appearing development or character truly is merited or compellingly related to an existing storyline, don’t expend more verbiage than necessary, and develop this thread just enough to tempt readers with the promise of a lot more to come in the next book.

18. When there are too many storylines going at once, you might forget about some for long stretches of time, and then have to scramble for a plausible way to bring it back in. Many of the chapters about Boris’s latest criminal schemes are far separated, and there’s over a year between a verdict (in a different storyline) and the carrying out of the sentence. Granted, it often does take a long time for the criminal justice system to move, and Boris’s exploited assistant Min-Ling tells Igor and Ilya, “….I want the cops to know a Chinese fellow started this investigation and did a lot of hard work. You’re a very late addition, and I’ll be so disappointed if the cops think two white fellows are the heroes who humored a Chinese guy and let him play along to feel important.”

19. If a seemingly great idea for a new storyline comes to you well past the midway point, don’t just dump it onto the page half-baked and expect it to naturally, quickly come together. Step back and take some time outlining all the possible directions you’re considering.

20. Writing your own indecision into the story as a purported serious plot is really embarrassing and amateurish!

21. If you keep rejecting every possible direction and detail of a storyline, to the point you suspect you’re deliberately looking for reasons to reject them, something deeper may be going on. Maybe you’re subconsciously projecting your own frustration and disappointments at a similar real-life situation, or someone put a bug in your ear and convinced you you’d automatically, immediately fail if you did that.

22. It’s okay for new characters to fade in importance as the story goes on and not have the consistently leading roles you foresaw. Let them drift off as the story develops if that’s the direction it’s going in, instead of awkwardly shoehorning them in just to remind the reader they still exist. Real-life friends naturally grow apart over time too.

Lessons learnt from five drafts of a 1.5M-word book that had six hiatuses, Part I

~ Carrie-Anne ~ 1 Comment

After over ten and a half years, it’s finally over. A book I initially envisioned as a fairly quiet transitional volume between the intense Sturm und Drang of Journey Through a Dark Forest and the future fifth book in the family saga of my Russian characters, with a guesstimate wordcount of 400,000, and maybe two years to complete the first draft of ended up at a million and a half words and needing to be published in four volumes like Dark Forest. I also took six hiatuses during the first draft, and unlike all the other books I’ve begun in adulthood, it went through five drafts instead of only two or three. The fourth and fifth didn’t have any significant changes, but they did have enough material edited out and added to be counted as distinct drafts.

Over the years, I’ve discussed many of the mistakes made and lessons learnt from this mentally exhausting endeavour. Let’s look at them, in no particular order.

1. It’s fine to be a plantser or pantser, but if the storylines for major characters (esp. the title characters!) don’t naturally start writing themselves and feel more like loosely-connected episodes than deliberately planned, plotted, and structured, you need to step back and outline what you’d like to happen.

2. This dilemma can be entirely prevented by having more than a loose, general, vague idea going in. Have distinct episodes that build upon one another and form a cohesive, deliberate storyline. Even books intended as more episodic still need hung on some kind of arc.

3. Spending too long with one book can lead to overthinking and second-guessing every detail. It’s fine to fact-check and make some final tweaks, but if you’re so worried about, e.g., the right name for a character who won’t even appear until the next book, just edit out a line where s/he’s mentioned.

4. If your characters are attending real schools, look up the dates of semesters, finals, and graduations in those years! I’m so angry at myself for creating so much unnecessary work and headache because I assumed the typical university schedule had always been what I knew it as, and then had to move sections and chapters out of the timeline I intended them in. Some sections were moved into other chapters.

5. If none of the real-life schools in a city feel 100% right, create your own! Then you can easily mix and match what you most like about the other schools you researched without being bound by, e.g., courses offered, the lack of a swimming pool, or students calling teachers by their first names.

6. Being too long with a manuscript may mess with your head to the extent you start feeling you have to keep going and going and going way past a natural stopping-point. If it’s part of a series, you’ll have the entire next book to explore all these new storylines, events, and characters.

7. Don’t be unafraid to budge from the original story direction(s) and ending you envisioned if things develop in a very different way. Though I never watched the show, I’ve heard a lot of fans of HIMYM ranting about the series finale (which seems as much a middle finger to the audience as that of Roseanne, which still makes me angry 29 years later) and speculating the writers were too wedded to their initial plans to go in a direction more realistic to the resulting character and story development.

8. Once you’ve wrapped up all the main storylines, bring the book to its natural close. Don’t be like a song that keeps going after the music stops or suddenly starts a surprise fourth verse after it seemed to be over.

Warning: NSFW or under 18!

9. Even if a big part of a storyline or character is going through school, it’ll get really boring and old fast if you only have classroom scenes. Think of a classic school-based show like Saved by the Bell (one of my guilty pleasures as a Xennial). The gang does lots of other things besides just being in class!

10. School scenes also risk getting stale and predictable if all you do is change out the teachers and classmates each year with very similar interactions and situations.

11. Since I was an undergrad from 1998–2002, I was blissfully unaware of the once-established custom of hazing first-year students at many schools and making them wear beanies to mark themselves for that ritual abuse and humiliation. I had to add in several dialogues and passages about my characters refusing hazing and thinking those beanies look ridiculous. Not EVERY frosh obediently submitted to this barbaric custom, and it began falling from favor thanks to G.I. Bill students who had no patience for these juvenile antics.

Why I didn’t delete more storylines from A Dream Deferred

~ Carrie-Anne ~ Leave a comment

Since A Dream Deferred: Lyuba and Ivan at University ended up ballooning well past my conservative initial guesstimate of 400K, to the point I’ll have to publish it in four volumes like Dark Forest, there was quite a lot to wade through when editing and rewriting finally began.

I’ve written at length about how my main problem in the first draft was my near-total lack of properly plotting and planning any of the Minnesota storylines with Lyuba, Ivan, and their three youngest daughters. My original chapter-by-chapter notes only had the most general of ideas, and they weren’t nearly enough to sustain full plot threads or organically give rise to a fully-realized storyline that writes itself.

The first things I cut in the second draft were all the new storylines introduced in Part IV and everything related to the “Let’s all move back to New York” storyline I hit upon late in Part III. One, the concluding portion of a book needs to focus on bringing existing storylines to a dénouement and tying everything together. Two, the storyline of Lyuba applying to grad school and making tentative steps towards moving back to NYC was way too bloated, directionless, and disconnected from the natural course of the story up to that point.

While I’ve saved the deleted storylines about Zhdana and Susanna’s unplanned pregnancies, Susanna’s resulting relationship drama with Vilorik, and Vilorik’s nascent romance with Platosha for the future fifth book, I realized I’d taken out way too much of the return to NYC storyline. Huge gaps and abrupt scene and dialogue endings were left in its place.

I proceeded to put a lot back in, then realized anew that was still way too much clutter with no clear direction. Eventually I hit upon a way to make it a natural, believable outgrowth of Lyuba and Ivan’s storyline, and wrote a number of new chapters in the third draft towards that purpose.

Had I left the idea of moving back to NYC until near the end of the book, as I had it at one point, there would’ve been giant gaps in its place. The question then would’ve been what to create to refill the gaps, or how to segue between the remaining material. And frankly, I just couldn’t be arsed at that late point.

I’m able to do radical rewrites and restructurings of my Atlantic City books because the first drafts were so underwritten, with plenty of room for new scenes and storylines, plus greatly expanding the existing material worth keeping. I was also much younger when I wrote those drafts, and not nearly as mature and evolved in my writing and plotting abilities. And with You Cannot Kill a Swan, I was easily able to change Lyuba’s true affections from Boris to Ivan because I was only seven chapters in and there were lots of unintentional but serendipitous seeds throughout which greatly worked in the advantage of the book’s new arc.

But with Dream Deferred, the entire book was completed. Despite deleting the late-arising new storylines and a huge chunk of the runaway storyline to nowhere about returning to NYC, I had to work with the material as-is. It was true hashgacha pratit (Divine Providence) I was able to find as many free spaces as I did to insert new chapters for the severely neglected Minnesota storylines. Thus, the idea of Lyuba and Ivan pursuing advanced studies and relocating was introduced much earlier and gradually developed over time instead of just dumped on the page half-baked.

I also removed a storyline that seemed like an awesome idea at the time, Katya and Dmitriy meeting another young Navy couple in San Francisco with a mysterious double connection to Katya’s family. This was developed and resolved way too quickly, and then dropped like it didn’t exist. Since I couldn’t figure out what to do with Katya and Dmitriy otherwise in those two chapters where they meet the couple, and wanted to keep the bits relevant to their storyline, they still meet Marusya at church and then Sima at the depot.

I reworked the material to emphasize Katya’s loneliness at not having any real friends, her sense of isolation so far away from her family and old friends, and how that’s impacting her mental state. This plants a spark that eventually comes to full flame when she returns to Minnesota during Dmitriy’s deployment to Korea.

Marusya and Sima will return in the fifth book, where there’ll be far more room to leisurely develop their storyline.

There were so many storylines I could’ve also moved to the fifth book, developed at a more leisurely pace over a longer time, or axed entirely to make the book shorter (relatively speaking). I also could’ve significantly edited them down like I did with the Barnard drama in Part IV, and Zoya’s accident on the skating rink and subsequent recovery in Parts III and IV. But realistically, they wouldn’t work in any other way. They’d either hit very different or be outright impossible, owing to how tightly they’re intertwined with other storylines and character arcs. E.g., some of the dialogue is contingent on Igor not yet knowing Violetta had polio, and Revmira’s first date with Grigor would end far differently when she’s living off-campus instead of in a dorm with a strict curfew she almost misses.

Plus, it wouldn’t be very realistic for these couples to only meet, get together, and/or marry at a later date, since this is 1948–52, not the modern era. Many of the ladies lament at still being uncoupled and childless in their mid-twenties, and some are frustrated their beaux wait six months to propose. This wasn’t an era of casually dating for fun until one’s thirties, indefinitely going steady for 5–10 years, cohabiting with no thought of marriage, and nonchalantly having kids with someone who’s only a boyfriend or girlfriend. These relationships need to happen at this specific point in their lives.

It’s also like asking parents which of their of ten kids they wish they didn’t have, or if they regret not reducing their quints to twins. These kids exist in material reality and aren’t abstract ideas. Likewise, each storyline, major or minor, comes together to help to form an integral whole. With even one missing or executed slightly differently, the resulting overall book wouldn’t be nearly the same.

IWSG—Story ideas, fifth draft fun, and future plans

~ Carrie-Anne ~ 4 Comments

InsecureWritersSupportGroup

Welcome back to the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, which convenes the first Wednesday of every month to commiserate over worries, fears, doubts, and struggles.

This month’s question is:

Do most of your story ideas come from one place (the news, dreams, etc.) or do they hit from all over the place?

I’ve been inspired by so many things over the years. All of my books feature “The Story Behind the Story” in the back matter, explaining where I got ideas from, what changed from my original vision, unplanned storylines, the writing process, etc. After being with my main two sets of characters for over thirty years now, ideas for future storylines just naturally come to me.

Little Ragdoll was of course inspired by The Four Seasons’ famous song “Rag Doll” and loosely based around the lyrics. When I first heard songwriter and keyboardist Bob Gaudio telling that story in 1993, I knew I had to write a book giving this raggedy poor girl a happy ending with a rich boy who loves her just as she is.

Other stories have been inspired by things in films, other books, historical events, and my own life. My long-hiatused soft sci-fi stories (most of which never got past the synopsis stage) were my excited youthful imaginings of life in various futuristic settings (space colony, flying city, underground city after the Sun burnt out, floating city, space farm, etc.). Despite how much time has passed, I still hope to someday transform these general ideas into actual books.

I’m over halfway through the fifth and final draft of A Dream Deferred, which, as I said last month, is 99% fixing the formatting so no lines end on a broken word (unless it’s part of a compound word) or start on only two letters of a hyphenated word, and so no right-hand pages end on a broken word. This mostly involves tightening line spacing to -1 or -2, increasing it to 1, adding or removing some words where possible, or rephrasing. Leaving the formatting as-is isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s important for indie authors to look as professional as possible. And being over half German, I thrive on this minute attention to detail!

This final run-through before submitting proofs is also vital for catching typos that somehow slipped by me every time before, like  “a long of her long raven hair” and “Without my money’s newspaper salary.” Those words were respectively meant to be “lock” and “mother’s.” During the fourth draft edits, I found typos like “at least twenty minutes over the speed limit.”

I also discovered the autumn semester at NYC universities in this era ended in late January, NOT December like I assumed. Though I already knew many schools started their spring semester in early February, I didn’t know students had finals in January. I just assumed they had a long winter break. Thankfully, this didn’t require any major changes, just editing out a brief bit of dialogue where Igor and Violetta are talking about their final grades and plans for next semester classes while having lunch at Woolworth’s on New Year’s Eve 1948, and then other references to autumn semester being over.

I also very belatedly discovered, to my great embarassment, that Kista (the name of one of Inessa Zyuganova’s cousins, never seen until this book) isn’t a name in any Slavic language, but rather means “cyst.” I changed it to Kasya, short for Kasimira, but that doesn’t feel right. The closest real name is Kristya from Kristina. Inessa’s aunt and uncle barely had any education, so I suppose Kista could work as her original family nickname.

Of the six cousins who come to America from London with their families in 1950, the only two who feature prominently are Oksana and Kilina, but I still need her to have the right name!

I’m also planning out my Soviet characters’ escape to the West in the fifth book, with a far different route, date, and means than I originally envisioned. Nelya Savvina’s husband will be another member of the large Zyuganov family, who grew up in Poland instead of Belarus. Instead of defecting through Finland or Iran, the Savvins will go through Poland and then on to Yugoslavia with forged passports and travel documents. Trieste, Italy is just over the border, though getting there won’t be easy.

Do you enjoy going over manuscripts with a fine-toothed comb during the final proofing?