How do I name my characters? That’s today’s question on the YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday.

I’m not one of those people who agonize over a name. I don’t research origin or meaning, I don’t pour over baby name books trying to find the perfect fit for the character.

I name my characters the same way I named my boys, they tell me. Now before you call the men in the nice white jackets, I’m not crazy. Usually the very first thing that comes to me when I am writing a new book is the character’s names. Sometimes it’s the ONLY thing they tell me!

They typically introduce themselves when I’m in the shower too. Characters have no sense of privacy, btw. I’ll be standing there washing my hair and I’ll hear, “Hi, my name is Sean and I’m supposed to be in the book your writing.” (Based on actual events, he did this after I had completed the book too. How nice of him. Grrr.)

Fellow writers out there will nod and commiserate with this, non writers will run for the hills screaming there’s a strange man in their shower. I’m so used to it I get nervous if they don’t show up (Cause that means they are all working together to plan some kind of sneak attack which never turns out well)

Sometimes I get their name wrong, and halfway through the book they tell me so. It’s pretty obvious along the way. The name just doesn’t flow with the story, or I stumble over it every time I write it down. Obviously my characters love a good joke because they never let me in on it until I’m way into the story.

So for me, there is no great method to the madness. I’m boring. I just do what they tell me to. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have someone to meet in the shower.

That is the question my fellow YA Highwayers and I are answering today. (I have to giggle cause Word is trying to change Highwayers to Highwaypersons. LOL)

Back to the question at hand. It’s easy and hard to answer. I write…sparse when I fast draft. And I like to write the entire book before I go back over to edit it. I usually come in around 35k, which means I need to add another 10-15k in edits in Round 2. (Then even more after my agent reads it and points out all the places I left big holes.) That’s actually the easy part. The hard part is adding dimension. I suck at that. I’m great at going off on a totally irrelevant subplot and losing direction, completely forgetting what and why my characters were doing something. They don’t need to solve the problem, cause look, they are doing something totally cooler! Riverdance!

But during that first draft, it doesn’t matter if they all want to jump up and down in unison to weird music. My rough draft is simply getting the story in all its unedited glory onto the page. The major players, the plot, the subplots and where everything happens. A 185-page outline. It’s usually pretty clean, just empty. Like a house you just bought. The structure is there, the rooms are there, and if your lucky, the previous owner left the appliances so you can wash your dirty moving clothes.

But then you get to move in and decorate, paint and call it yours. The second round is the magical one where the story comes to life. Some people I know can write a first draft and have it so concise and clean, they can turn it in as is with no editing. I’m not one of them. But my way works for me, and it still allows for the occasional off plot treks. And Riverdancing.