When I was taking a lot of creative writing classes in college, one subject that always seemed to come up was the difficulty of naming characters. Many of my classmates used to discuss in length how coming up with unique names for their characters was always a difficult thing for them. That never seemed to be the case with me though. Perhaps, due to my reading a lot of science fiction and fantasy stories and being very familiar with odd – even unpronounceable – names, I relished coming up with new names.
I’m not sure if other writers do this but one little trick I use when coming up with new names is to secretly give meaning behind a name. For example, in today’s strip, I needed to create a new name for Leland’s teacher in the second panel. Even though it’s a very small part in Leland’s strip today, nothing I was coming up with was very inspiring or appealed to me very much… until I fell back on my little creative writing trick.
in order to give you a bit of a look behind the curtain, today’s creative name was inspired by my sister-in-law who also happens to be an actual, real-life teacher. I spliced her middle name with her married name and that’s how I came up with “Ms. Lynick” (hope you don’t mind, Sharon).
So… now you know… the REST of the story…
🙂
-Chris
