The Naming Game
Under the Darkened Moon once had a character named Kal. Kal, alas, is no more. Oh, he still exists in the story, but he is no longer called Kal. His new name in the final manuscript is Tarek.
Why did I change his name? Ultimately it was because too many characters had names starting with the letter K. Kyel and Kath were enough, so I changed Kal to something else.
The decision was made easier during the live read edit when my wife was reading the story. She has this particular drawl to her speech where she constantly replaces the “a” sound in words with an “e” and visa versa. She also does the same thing with the “e”s to “i”s for some reason. But she only does it on certain words. For example, pen is pin, but ten is not tin. She never pronounced one of the characters, called Den, as Din.
Well, anyway, she kept saying Kel and not Kal. It got to the point where I couldn’t tell whether it was Kal or Kyel speaking. There were also just a lot of hard “k”s in the dialogue because of this which I thought was clunky and awkward because they started too many names. When looking at the words as written it was obvious, but listening was just too confusing. So, to make it easier, I simply changed the name, problem solved.
Funny how things progress and change when playing the naming game.
Leave a Reply