s-leary replied to your post “listen” I

[dragonlady7]

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s-leary replied to your post “listen”

I am here for it, but saving it for a day when I’m not too worn out from painting to remember who the hell everyone is.

I don’t know how much longer it’s gonna take me to post it, so. It’s grown way beyond my expectations and now there’s a semi-plot. All I really wanted was to write cute first-time wedding night smut but that keeps getting pushed off… Maybe someday. You’ll probably have finished painting your house by then.

s-leary replied to your post “goblin emperor”

I’m so glad you enjoyed it! I love it. The multiplicity of names was a lot, but still slightly easier than Sherwood Smith’s Inda series, which has an even larger cast of people with given names, last names, titular names, and nicknames… some of whom are namesakes. ��

ohhh boy.

Yeah I just. Finally I started writing down everyone I thought was important so I could refer back. I think a large part of it was that there were so many featuring phonemes that are rare or unused in English, and so I’d be like ah that’s Cso-and-so and then there were like eight Cso-and-sos so that didn’t work.

I have to keep the bookmark of reference names close to hand while writing because even fifty pages in I’m still forgetting whether it’s Telimezh or Telimazh, and Csethero is Csethiro? I’m not sure. 

C’est la conlang, really. I’ll keep this in mind when worldbuilding, myself– I <i>have</i> been keeping this in mind, actually, and have been conscientious about giving characters pronounceable and distinct names, and it’s sort of freeing to consider that, well, not everyone does that and you can still kind of make a choice about it. 
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Comments

[unicornduke]

I haven't read the Goblin Emperor but I really appreciate that you are giving all your characters distinct names because I have so much trouble with this. It's one reason I can't read things like game of thrones but also a beloved book had two characters, one named Raoul and one name Roald. I can't keep them straight and I hate that. That's basically the same name.

[dragonlady7]

I am of two minds on it-- I mean, obviously, in real life there are going to be cases where people just have similar names, and that's part of realism. If you're studying history you just have to deal with annoying shit like men endlessly named for their fathers, and the fact that literally everyone who had a daughter in 1980 named her Jennifer and that's just how it works.
But on the other hand, listen, I want readers to have some fucking attention to spare for my actual plot, right?? So I'm not going to have characters have similar names without at least lampshading it. ("Oh brother, you're both named Hank? Well, you're gonna need nicknames" and then Hank 2 is Buddy for the rest of the book unless it's funny.)

The Goblin Emperor is a wonderful piece of work that both beautifully upholds and subverts many tropes that richly deserve it, and I love it, but Christ almighty, you have to memorize the caste titles with zero notice and then understand that Csethiro, Csaivo, Csoru, Csevet, Celehar, Cala, and Kiru are all really important characters for really different reasons. There was definitely one really important scene where a character declaims something passionately and I actually set the book down on the first read-through, rubbed my face, and said aloud, "That would have been really meaningful if I had any idea who the fuck this is."

So. Worth it, but.
I won't be world-building like that, my ass is wayyyy too ADHD for that.

[unicornduke]

I think the thing with books is that there's only so many people you can track since you don't know them in real life. I know at least three Zack's but like, they're different people and I can tell that because I have memories and experiences of them as different people. But like. Books, they're flat people until you make them not flat and there's only so much time and space to do so and only so much brain power as a reader I can devote to that.

That's kinda why we do the thing "which Zack? oh not office Zack, I mean, farm Zack, tall, nice" kinda thing because then we can identify those traits and we have real memories of them. idek.

[dragonlady7]

Oh, absolutely. I figure you can get away with a little of it in writing only if you go out of your way to make that plain. Like, if I had two characters with the same name I would constantly refer to them with an adjective as part of their name, as part of the POV character's perspective. Blond Jen and Short Jen, or something. I'm trying to think if I've ever done it. I think in some old things I've had characters where I mashed their description into their name but largely because I kept changing their names and confusing myself.

But, obviously, this is something where other writers' mileage varies.