I came late to Twitter’s “Harsh Writing Advice” trend, but apparently someone posted that other writers are your competition, and then got slammed, and then deleted the tweet, but of course (because Internet) it’s still around in various formats. People piled on this guy for posting this, and… given that he didn’t really explain his logic (if there was any),
This question has come up a lot just recently, so I decided to write a post about it: “How do you name your characters?” I prefer to have my characters introduce themselves. Sometimes they do that right away, meaning I know their name first thing. Sometimes, though, they’re a bit shy about it, and we play a game of Rumpelstiltskin.
I’m going to tell you a little secret about writing. (It’s not really a secret. Lots of people know this. But I’m going to reiterate it anyway.) There are many things that are fun to write. Certain scenes. Writers often play with their characters as if they were dolls in a dollhouse. We try out a few things, see what