Writers think carefully about what to call their stories. So do publishers. I have one story that may be being hindered by its title. Let me explain.

Some titles are very direct. Let’s look at some movie titles as examples. If Star Wars isn’t about wars in space, I’ll be very disappointed. Other titles are more evocative without necessarily meaning anything. Apocalypse Now has nothing to do with the apocalypse. Reservoir Dogs? Spoiler: It isn’t about reservoirs or dogs. Still, each of these is a memorable title.

Think about The Life of Pi or The Forever War or Cloud Atlas. There’s a lot to be said for giving your story a memorable title.

But what if the title hits the reader wrong?

I have a story. It’s gotten excellent feedback from a number of editors. Each has loved it, but… And the “but” never gets quite articulated. I wonder now if maybe it’s the story’s title that’s causing the ‘but’.

What’s the story called? Graceful Degradation.

It’s not about BSDM (BDSM?). There are no whips, no bondage. The title comes from an old profession of mine, User Experience Design (aka UX). In UX, the concept of graceful degradation is that if something fails the user, it should do so in a way that allows some continued level of usage.

The primary example of this is a comparison of elevators and escalators. At the most basic level, both move people between floors. If an elevator breaks, it is no longer a means of getting from one floor to another. However, if an escalator breaks, it gracefully degrades into a staircase: still usable, if less helpful.

I took that concept and applied it to tokens of memory: photos, writing, music. What if they all were designed to degrade gracefully? What if there was no permanence allowed, so artists made works in such a way that the failings revealed new insights or expressions.

This is the backdrop for the story Graceful Degradation. Within this universe, there is a man trying to honour the memory of his dead wife. He wants to preserve photos of their wedding. He wants to preserve a recording of their wedding song. But each of these isn’t only difficult-by-design, they’re illegal.

So our protagonist is driven to some of the darker corners of society. He’s noble in intent but ill-equipped for the deception he needs to pull off.

As I said, I’ve gotten complimentary rejections of this story from editors of literary and genre magazines around the world. They like it… but…

Since no one can articulate the ‘but’, I’ve come to wonder if it’s the title that’s the hang up. I really like the title. I hope I’m wrong.

If you think you’d be interested in reading Graceful Degradation, it’s included in the collection The Maiden Voyage of Novyy Mir and Other Short Stories. The book is available in either e-reader/epub or paperback. Click this books2read link to get a list of retailers carrying the book. Or you can buy it through my indie publisher site, Skrap Books, if you’re in the US or Canada and would prefer to put more money into my pocket as opposed to the big box bookstores.

Like many things in life, the act of creation that we call writing comes in many forms. The most notable definitions are plotter and pantser. As you’d expect, a plotter is someone who plots their stories before they write. A pantser is someone who doesn’t plot, but makes it up as they write. Many Plotters write linearly, starting at chapter one and stopping at “The End”.

Many pantsers jump around within the story, incorporating plot points or detail as they go. Sometimes there’s a logic to this process, even if it’s not linear or plotting. For example, I like to write counterpoint scenes together (Scene one starts a story arc, Scene two gives the pay-off) even if those scenes aren’t in the same book, never mind the same chapter.

Of course plotting and pantsing aren’t mutually exclusive methods. Most writers are a mix of both, but lean heavily one way or the other. I would say I’m about 80% pantser and 20% plotter, or maybe 90/10. Whichever, I’m heavily on the pantser side.

I thought I’d share a bit about the evolution of a few story ideas from a pantser’s perspective to give you plotters out there some insight into how our (or at least my) minds work.

I had a number of story ideas back in the mid-1980s that have evolved substantially from where they started.

The one that’s evolved the least, and the first novel that I ever wrote, is a 135,000 space opera with military sci-fi leanings. If I ever want to publish it, I’ll need to do a rewrite, as it doesn’t reflect the quality of my writing now, and I wouldn’t want it out there as is. (I also have a cool idea for an alternative edit of it, so you can read it twice, the second time from a different perspective).

Then there was the story that I called The Key to Alexandria. It was about three gems and the various elements trying to control and unite them. The lead character, a modern-day man, must learn how to travel through time to control them and save the Earth from the demons that would be released if someone else gets control. The story ended with the destruction of the library in ancient Alexandria and the simultaneous destruction of the Moon, dooming all life on Earth.

The sequel, The Legacy of Alexandria, would follow the protagonist’s attempts to set things right – keep the destruction of the library, but save the Moon and thus Earth. Notably these two stories never left Earth, but played with time travel.

How they’ve evolved.

There are no more crystals. There are no more demons. The story barely touches on Earth, instead dealing with a close encounter in deep space and the repercussions that arise from it. There’s a huge time jump between book 1 and book 2 (about 300 years). The second book does deal with Earth a lot more, but is still space opera in its execution and tropes.

What’s stayed the same? The (human) characters and the themes.

The third idea that I’d developed the most was tentatively called Hawke, Inc. It was an episodic series that dealt with a far future society scattered among many stars. (It was ‘my Star Trek’ so to speak). In this universe, a very rich recluse named Hawke was spending his fortune to disrupt powerful corrupt governments by funding a series of ships and their counterinsurgency crews. These professional troublemakers would try to level the playing field for the less powerful.

In some ways the bones of this structure are still here, although less polemic. Hawke has been demoted to ship’s captain. His ship, name not finalized yet, was a mid-tier diplomatic ship from the local equivalent of the UN. But in this universe, the UN is being defunded by the superpowers, and losing all authority (so nothing like Star Trek’s Federation). In fact this UN has fallen so far from grace that they can’t completely crew their vessels with recruits. So they’ve started press-ganging some classes of criminals into serving on the vessels. The five-book story follows one such ship as it press-gangs a smuggler and gets into crazy adventures.

This story keeps evolving. As I’ve been writing it, I decided that I needed more layers. I’ve borrowed characters from a short story that I wrote a few years ago, and put them front and centre in this universe. Hawke isn’t in the story for very long now. The ‘love interest’ is a much more fleshed out character, and has a pretty cool story arc now that includes not just how she got disowned by her parents, and also her redemption (the plotter in me knows her whole path). She didn’t exist a year ago. Now, she’s the emotional core of the (over 30 year old) story.

And just today, I realized that the story works better if the ship isn’t “a mid-tier diplomatic ship” but a cadet training vessel being pressed into more and more dangerous service due to budget and crew shortfalls. This allows me to have a logical reason for scenes of conflict among the command crew and department heads. It allows me to incorporate minor info dumps as cadets are being taught on the job. This also sets up a cool set of scenes in book 3 when the remnants of the crew merges with three other crews to form a new one.

This is pantsing, in its purest form.

How exactly a writer names their characters and who the characters are is a process that is personal and almost unique to each writer, however there are some over-simplifications we can state: There are writers who draw from people in their lives, and there are writers who draw from what the story demands.

I fall into the latter category. I’m not one of those, “you’d better be nice to me or I’ll kill you off in my next book,” types. And I have my own rules for how I name characters.

My characters are very much driven by the demands of the story and what I discover about them as I write it. This doesn’t mean that I don’t see things in my life and things, ‘hey, that’d work well in my story.’ I do, but I don’t model whole characters after whole people, and my characters are largely undefined until needed.For example, in early drafts of the Deacon Carver stories, Char Osbaldistan was a man. I recently discovered that the character works better as a woman (not for some romantic subplot, but to explore a glass-ceiling military scenario). I’m still contemplating renaming her Chard Osbaldistan. The implied “shard” and all that can evoke in the reader appeals to me. You can read about Char(d) here.

I write very slowly, and sometimes life catches up to me, forcing me to make changes to a character. I had a character named Susan in early drafts of Tau Ceti. She met a very gruesome, untimely end. I met and married a Susan (3rd anniversary last week!). Obviously I couldn’t have her name applied to a character who suffered so much. It just wouldn’t feel right. So two changes happened. The fate of Susan was applied to another character (actually making the story stronger, as this was now a loss of a leader) and the name of Susan changed to Sumin – a common Korean girl’s name.

But you can’t let the world dictate your character names. If you could never name a character after someone you’ve met, you’d be very frustrated.

As a teacher who’s taught students from almost every nation (I’m not kidding, I’ve even had students from North Korea. My one gap is central America — basically the countries between Mexico and Venezuela — and the Caribbean) I’ve known too many people with too many names to never use the name of someone I’ve known. So I have a different strategy. I won’t use a name if I’ve only known one person by that name. I’ve known many Jennifers, for example, too many, really (Sorry Jenn, Jen & Jeni*) so that name is fair game, and taught at least two Sumins.

Going through an old draft of a story I’m revamping, I realised that along the way I’ve edited out a character who could be a powerful element in the plot, both foreshadowing the fate fo the main character and giving stakes to the team. The character’s name is Hawke. Which is fine, I don’t know anyone named… shoot … I do, only one. The writer Sam Hawke, author of The City of Lies. (I don’t know her well, she’s a Twitter friend. We joke about accents and pronunciation occasionally.) I’ve rationalised not changing the name three ways: First, the character is a different gender than the author; Second they only share a family name (the character has a rank and is never referred to by first name) and third (and weakest), I don’t actually know the author that well. We’ve never been in the same room.

I also have a precedent. I have a character named Haskins in a novel that might get pulled out of the drawer and rewritten some day. When I wrote it (1990s), I didn’t know anyone by that name. Now I do. I won’t be changing it for the same reasons as above.

Where can writers find names?

Many writers consult baby name lists. That’s fine, but I don’t.

I’ll generally use placeholder names until I have a sense of the character, then I’ll look around for a name that fits. One place that I look for names is International sporting tournaments. Ice Hockey is great for Eastern European names, Cricket is great for Indian and South African names, likewise rugby for Pacific Islander names. Historical videos on YouTube are great for learning names that have fallen out of fashion.

Sometimes you have a specific need. I needed a Peruvian name (not a Spanish-origin name) that had a specific meaning. Googling and following leads beyond that, I eventually found the name. I’m not going to share it or the meaning I was searching for, as the meaning is a plot spoiler for Tau Ceti.

Some final advice on names: Never take a complete name (first and last) and avoid names of the most famous people in a setting (so no Beckham, Ronaldo, or Rooney, please).

Happy hunting!

Notes:
I refer to Tau Ceti in this story. The novel should be complete and available for purchase by the end of 2021.
I refer to the Deacon Carver stories. They started with the short story ‘Dee, For The Win’ previously on Wattpad, now to be in included in my short story anthology due out in October 2021. The sequence will continue in a series of novellas shortly thereafter.
“Sorry Jenn, Jen & Jeni” I’ve known multiple women with each of these variations (also Jennie and Jenny) so even I don’t know to whom I’m apologizing.

I had a conversation on Twitter recently with a writer of historical fiction. He had a dilemma and was looking for advice. He desperately wanted to use a specific word, but it hadn’t been coined until one year after his story took place.

I suggested that he follow the lead of bestselling historical fiction writer Conn Iggulden and simply note in an appendix anywhere in which he was knowingly historically inaccurate and why he had made that decision. I’ve found Iggulden’s notes to be interesting and revealing about the writing process, as well as giving me some history.

This writer replied that he would not do such because he writes historical fiction, not historical fantasy.

And that’s fair, power to him. I’m not in any way criticizing that decision. I respect it.

For me this was the revelation that there’s “hard” and “soft” historical fiction genres much the same way there are hard and soft science fiction genres (with soft science fiction often being called science fantasy by fans of hard science fiction).

Although I’m hard-pressed to name a hard scifi story (pun, huh), other than The Martian, soft sicfi is easy to point out: Star Wars. The ‘soft’ aspects include faster-than-light travel, death stars… the actual fantasy aspects are easy to see, too: Monks with flaming swords, telekinesis, and mind controlling abilities.

Hard scifi only uses established science in its story. Most science fiction is not ‘hard’, even stories that strive to be often fail at some point. Even The Martian failed, as the inciting event, a devastating sand storm, isn’t actually possible on Mars (The movie adaptation also fails in depicting Martian gravity – hard scifi is hard to write).

Oddly, stories that are not science fiction tend to be truer to science that hard scifi simply because they generally don’t touch on it at all. YouTube keeps trying to get me to watch a video called “The most scientifically accurate movies” and of course its default image is The Martian. But I bet that When Harry Met Sally is 100% scientifically accurate. In fact any RomCom that doesn’t involve some kind of magic is probably more accurate than almost any scifi movie.

This would hold true for books, too. Your basic romance novel, that doesn’t delve into things like firefighters at work, probably has less scientific inaccuracies than The Martian. I’d bet that The Kite Runner has less scientific inaccuracies than The Expanse.

Many hard science fiction enthusiasts claim that any use of aliens breaks the code. The Expanse does this. It also uses those aliens to allow for interstellar travel by having them gift us their abandoned wormholes. But it fails much earlier anyway. The astronauts travel from planet to planet in our solar system using a high velocity engine that defies current physics and survive the gee forces by consuming magical serums.

Some science fiction writers try to hold themselves to a standard that is almost impossible to keep and still tell the story. Which is fine, that’s their choice. But you’ve got to be at peace when the needs of the story conflict with current scientific understanding, and not see it as you failing, because by that standard, you’re going to fail.

Now I know someone trying to do the same in historical fiction, to the point of obsessing about whether one single word’s origin within 12 months of the setting of the events destroys the accuracy of his story. I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes. I’d be worried that there’s some other word I’d used without realizing that it was modern, or that its meaning had shifted.

Not to be either too pedantic or obvious, but words shift meaning quite rapidly. An example from within my own lifetime is the word ‘gay.’ When I was young, it meant ‘joyful’. Here are two examples of it used in that context.

The second verse of Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Make the Yule-tide gay
From now on
Our troubles will be miles away

The ending of the theme song to the TV cartoon The Flintstones:

When you’re with the Flintstones
Have a yabba dabba doo time, a dabba doo time
We’ll have a gay old time
We’ll have a gay old time

I guess my point is it’s almost impossible to be one hundred percent correct in either historical or scientific accuracy. If you do achieve that, you’ve truly achieved something, but if you fail, and you probably will, don’t tie too much of your identity in success that failure hurts you.