The power of names

[hrj]

Yesterday and today I set myself to working on titles and forms of address to be used in the novel. I ran a large number of possible roots and compounds through the phonological mill, applied my general principle that romance roots are considered more upperish-class and germanic ones more lowerish-class, and picked the results with the right "feel". The next step was putting together a matrix of all relevant combinatorial interactions of class, formality, age, and intimacy and sketching out the general social rules for address and reference. The exciting part was that as I started firming up the results, I could feel the tone of the story shift from "generic Englishy feel" to "definitely Somewhere Else". "Mistress *placeholder*" is a rather different person from "Maisetra Sovitre". One of the fun things I hope to do in my overly-analytical way is to track the shifting relationships between the main characters not only in how they address and refer to each other, but -- in the case of the two POV characters -- how people get referred to during their "stage time". Yes, it's a bit excessively picky, but it's sort of like getting the food right, or the clothes right. I have most of the main characters named at this point, so I think I'm ready to start the revision process on Part I. I'm guessing that what with one thing and another this process will take me through the end of the year.

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[hrj.livejournal.com]

One of the "process oriented" parts of this writing project is that I'm keeping something of a process diary with notes on where the concept started, what threads went into it, how the basic structures evolved, and so forth. The stuff I'm posting is part of that, but only a small part. Most of it would be too spoilery in my opinion. I might let someone read it after they've read the finished novel, but not before.