Naming your Beasts - by Jan Edwards
Names are one of the biggest problems for me with any writing. Names matter. They attract or deflect by their very nature, colouring our view through our own personal experience. A character names Maude for example may conjure an older woman, possibly Victorian fiction as Maude was a daughter of the old Queen. Or a very much older Empress Maud who was an ancient claimant of the English crown. I recently had birthday notifications on the same day, via Facebook, for two Michaels. One is generally known as Mick and the other as Mike. They are both thoroughly nice guys but possessed of very different personalities, and I would never address Mick as Mike or vice versa. Why they should have gained their separate diminutives is unknown. They are of similar age and, one assumes, similar background. Is it regional? A possibility. I don’t expect I shall ever know. But the point to be made is that in my mind they are their name. Which brings me back to fictional character...