This is not Part 3. It’s just two things I thought of tacking on to
part 2.
What can I say? Part 2s are easy blog post fodder; Part 2 appendixes
are even easier.
One, there’s one other wall I run into often during those rare
attempts when I get motivated enough to try to write a story: naming
characters is hard. At least, it provides an excellent motivational
roadblock whenever I even consider committing a story to paper, a point
before I’ve actually written anything at which I think “maybe I should
give up and go on Facebook instead” and proceed to do so. Aggh. And I
think there’s more than one reason for this:
I have trouble coming up with names to some degree. Sure, it’s easy to
browse BabyNames.com and look for choices, but a lot of the names there
are really weird and contemplating them for every unimportant character
kind of rips me out of the immersed mindset.
Reading great stories in English class and elsewhere may have gotten me
feeling like every name ought to be a deep meaningful allusion, or at
least pun fodder. I feel like I will regret it if I write a story and, a
few months and/or chapters down the road, realize I missed a better name
or the name I chose has some undesirable connotations in context or
provides an atmosphere-ruining coincidence.
But I think the real kicker is simply that some part of me is
terrified of the awkwardness of giving a character the same name as
anybody I know, because then they might read the story and wonder if the
character is somehow based on them. And too many of the names that I
consider common enough to not lure readers off into looking for hidden
meanings are used up that way. This is obviously worst if the character
is an antagonist. But it seems just as awkward if the character is a
protagonist in accord with everything I’ve written, i.e. a paper-thin
character blatantly created for escapist purposes. I am already kind of
terrified I might ever meet anybody with the same name as one of my
mentally established characters even though I haven’t actually written
anything about him. And there’s a well-established convention of
not
reusing a first name in a work, so this gets even harder with every
work; I’m just as worried, what if somebody thinks this character is
related to the other character in that story I wrote in second grade? Oh
no!!
It’s like not reusing variable names in a programming language where
everything is in the same scope. Positively nightmarish.
And I actually discovered some evidence this is a thing in my past: I
found some stories I wrote in 2004. They are possibly the most extreme
exemplification of
Write
What You Know imaginable: the main character, Michael, goes to
school and makes friends. That’s all.
Illustration courtesy Brian2004
I kind of want to share these stories, but fast-forward a few years
and you’ll see that a classmate named Michael entered my grade and we
stayed in the same grade until we graduated.
Hi, Michael. You’re probably not reading this, but the character I
created in 2004 is not in any way based on or inspired by you,
especially not this image. And unlike later in this post where I name a
character after myself, I’m not being sarcastic, really.
This essay was partly inspired by but mostly orthogonal in purpose to
dzaefn’s essay on a similar subject,
Humans,
Photographs, and Names. I agree with many of its points, although I
deviate in that I think it’s more important for my Facebook picture to
identify me than to inform about me (there’s the rest of Facebook, plus
my maybe half a dozen other sites, for doing so). Part of the problem
for me there, and part of the reason I hang on to my nine-letter random
handle from fourth grade, is that my names, first and last, are so
commonplace. Among the people who share them (according to DuckDuckGo)
are a New York Times tech writer, more than one computer science
professor, a photographer, a couple doctors, and some guy who did some
sort of graphics work for a short clip and two movies. This means that,
to somebody not already in my social circles trying to match me to my
account, my Facebook photo is my primary tool for disambiguating myself
from all these other people, and I don’t think there is anything that
could do that job quite as precisely as a picture of my actual face and
body.
Still, I agree enough to be bothered by having a profile picture
suffering from “the whole extent of photographic informational void”. I
always planned to add some GIMP layers to the photo to indicate context
and content more precisely. Except I procrastinated and it got more and
more awkward to do this as time went by, since as far as I know, normal
people update their profile pictures only to reflect more recent events,
especially when they’re important. Like, you know, graduating from
high school? So yes, I’ve been waiting to do this for an entire
year now.
Eh, to hell with awkwardness. That’s the spirit of this daily-posting
exercise.
(Fun fact: The code in what I’m about to set as my profile picture,
if I don’t procrastinate even more, is real IOI 2014 code I submitted
successfully (for
rail,
as previously featured; the visually selected fragment was the key
fix for the final bug I fixed). Except I actually had to manually retype
my code printout to get the picture because I lacked the foresight
(sound familiar?) to save an electronic copy of my IOI submissions.)
Also, I’m glad this isn’t a smiling photo because I feel like it’s
easier to appreciate happy posts from a person whom one associates with
a serious face, than serious posts from a person whom one associates
with a happy face, and I want both types of posts to impact people when
I post them. I could be overgeneralizing from my own feelings though. If
you are reading this and want to chat me feedback (as way more than one
of you has been doing), I’d welcome more data points on this issue.
That’s not what I really wanted to rant about in this post,
though.
Note: I wrote this in 2012. Maybe it’s kind of
amusing?
For some reason, everybody around here seems to think that adding
English characters, no matter how broken or meaningless, confers an
added sense of quality or superiority. I don’t really understand the
mindset here but it’s the only explanation I can come up with. It’s
certainly not to make the lives of our English-speaking population any
easier.
We were sharing songs in Chinese class with literary techniques, and
there were a bunch of songs, including mine, by this pretty famous
singer with the stage name
Fish Leong. Okay,
it’s kind of cute and it’s a translated homophonic Cantonese pun, so it
makes some sense, although I wonder what people would think the name
meant if mentioned without any context. There was this more obscure guy
a couple seasons back in the reality TV singing competition (see, no
original shows around here) whose name was Quack. smacks head
It’s also kind of cute if you only know that the word is the sound a
duck makes, which probably holds for most of the audience. But still, it
takes just five seconds to
put it into Wikipedia.
Oops?