I love BABY NAME BOOKS! I like to browse through them - collect them ! That's because I'm inspired by names to develop characters.
Get this: In college I wrote a long story in which I made up a name for a character. It was an unusual name but felt right to me. In fact, it was as if this character, who I came to know well, was telling me what their name was, the way you hear some babies, before birth, whisper their name to their mothers or commuicate it silently as newborns. So I went with this character name. But in critique sessions in my writing workshop the professor and a couple students told me that the name was too unusual, that they got stuck on it while reading. Not good!
I tried, I really did, to find another name for this character. I questioned my motivations for naming this character something unusual. But then again, she was hardly an ordinary person. I was grateful that I could find and replace, using the computer, when the time came to change the name, but simply I never did find another name for the character and the manuscript remains in storage at this time.
Then recently I was looking through a baby name book and there it was - for the first time I had ever seen it in print - this unusual name I had used for the character!
C Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved including International and Internet Rights
