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306 Part V: Polishing Your Product: Revising and Editing
Names carry a great deal of information about characters – their age, background,
parents’ aspirations for them – and also often have a meaning that
influences your readers. The sound of names also has an impact: a name that
sounds soft creates a different impression to a name that has a lot of hard
sounds in it. Ordinary names go with ‘everyman’ characters, while unusual
names draw attention to an exceptional character.
If you’re going to change a character’s name, I suggest you do so straight away,
before any major reworkings, and not at the last moment. If an agent or publisher
asks you to change it at a late stage, as I’ve known happen, I recommend
you do a search and replace right at the last minute before you submit your
novel, or you may find you have to change everything about your character!
If you do an electronic search and replace, always check each instance. If the
name forms part of many words, you find that replacing ‘Ray’ with ‘Ralph’
results in words such as ‘portralphed’ and phrases such as ‘the first ralphs of
the sun’. An apocryphal story relates that just before submitting a typescript,
a writer decided to change his character’s name from David to Geoff. He was
horrified to later realise that this meant that in one scene his characters had
been admiring Michelangelo’s famous statue of Geoff!
Changing the location can also have far-reaching impacts. Each city or country
has its own geography, culture and mores. A writer I know decided to
change her location from London to Brighton, and had to change almost
every scene.
Altering the story’s structure
Unsurprisingly, deciding to alter your work’s structure requires some radical
change. Perhaps you told the story chronologically but now realise the story
would work better if you started nearer the end and told the early part through
flashback (see Chapters 3, 13 and 19). Doing so allows you to start at a high
point in the story and so can be a good way to increase narrative tension.
Sometimes deciding which way to go can be hard. In his 1934 novel Tender
Is the Night, F Scott Fitzgerald told the story with flashbacks. After Scott
Fitzgerald’s death, a new version was published (in 1948), based on the
author’s notes, that relates things chronologically. People still argue about
which version works best.
You almost certainly find a much better flow to your prose and structure when
you write it continuously.