Coming up with names for characters in my short stories and novel has always been a challenge. There’s the desire to avoid names with feel too ‘common’ and lack their own sense of character, the Bobs and so forth, but going too far afield into actual names that are exceptionally rare feels false. This is a    hurdle I have to overcome with every piece of fiction, no matter how long or how brief and can be magnified if the character in question is an alien because before I can name the character I have to devise a naming system for his culture because after all individual name plus family name isn’t even universal among humans.

For my novel being published next month I managed to make this difficult task even harder.

The set-up in the novel is that when the Earth is threatened with destruction by a rouge brown dwarf passing through the inner solar system humanity launches hundreds if not thousands of automated arks loaded with self-replicating machines, artificial wombs, and banks of sperm and egg to establish new human colonies. Some of these arks were programmed with very specific goals of persevering certain cultures, nationalities, and religion and so forth, some were designed to have a greater degree of freedom in the care of the generations of humans that were to follow.

For the colony of Nocturnia where the novel takes place the demographic percentages of the later 21^st century America were used to create the racial make-up of the colony and the names were taken from the U.S. Census but in drafting the outline and creating the character I faced a decision that swung me back and forth for quite some time.

Should the character names be tied to their character’s ethnicity?

These characters had never in any sense at all be a product of the cultures that their names derived from for all intents and purposes they were faux-Americans. With their ark’s designers fixated on an idealized American culture that never truly existed would that have programmed the artificial intelligences to force names to match ethnic background or simply have left the assignment of names to the A.I. own randomness?

I liked the idea that the names were randomly assigned but I was concerned that the readers might be lost of confused. I wanted to avoid leaning too heavily on reminding the reader just what each character’s ethnic heritage was and if I kept the names tied to their heritage I could side-step the challenge. But once I hit on the idea of the randomness of the names I really really liked it.

In the end I went the character names that do not map to their racial appearance. Now with the book coming out next month and should reviews and feedback come back my direction I will learn if I met the challenge or faceplanted.

One of the most common pieces of advice  you’re likely to hear at seminars, workshops, conventions, and writing groups is that publishers and agents do not want to see prologs. This is a true statement that is often countered by pointing to numerous books that currently sit on shelves with prologs. Of course, as a counter example that is not a very good argument because it suffers from survivor bias, the only books that sit on booksellers’ shelving are the book that were published a tiny fraction of the novel written and a tiny fraction of those submitted for consideration to agents and publishers.

Why is there such an often-repeated suggestion to omit your prolog? It is because far too many prologs are nothing more than either world building or backstory establishment where authors fearful that the readers will be lost create to explain the opening situation and there in a single word is why these prologs are weak openings, ‘explain.’

When you start your novel you have a very limited window to grab the reader’s attention and starting out with an explanation tends to lack dramatic tension. Agents and editors, people with little time and a very tall stack of things to read will smell an obvious explanation focused opening and from that deduce that the writer is unlikely to handle the rest of the story well and stop reading. Casual readers may give you more space but aside from self-publishing you must first survived the fires of the agents and editors to reach that larger audience.

I have a novel coming out next month, Vulcan’s Forge and to much amusement from members of my writers’ group it has a prolog. However, when I first wrote the novel it did not. After the first round of beta readers one of the more common comments centered of confusion about events that had happened prior to the start of the story. Because Vulcan’s Forge is written in a first-person point of view, I had two options to fix the issue. I could have characters that were there tell the point of view character what happened much like how a detective in some novels will gather everyone together for the resolution of the mystery, or I could show the events in a prolog. Clearly, I went with the prolog and clearly it did not cause my editor to bounce the manuscript, but I think there were a couple of factors that helped my novel survive the issue around having a prolog.

To start with the prolog is presented in third person. This cleanly breaks it away from the rest of the novel setting the tone that there is much that the main character is unaware of and that presents a danger to him. Next the prolog itself is a scene of dramatic tension with a viewpoint character that faces a tribulation and suffers its resolution. The vital information that my beta readers felt was missing is presented in the context of characters in conflict and not direct exposition. And finally, the prolog ends with a dramatic hook that leads directly into the opening scene of the novel so that the reader but not the character is aware of the importance of the story opening sequence.

Prologs can work but you must understand the purpose of your prolog and you must always wrap it in dramatic narrative if it is to be seen as essential to your piece.