GUEST BLOG: Brenda Clough on Naming Places (part 3)

Writer and Book View Cafe member Brenda Clough shares insights on how she comes up with names for characters, places, and more!


Whatever or whoever your characters are, they need a setting. A country, a town, a space ship, a country-western bar.As with other names, there is a major divide here — the ones that exist in the real world, and the ones that you make up. In this day of interconnectivity, it takes maybe five minutes to find the top-rated Chicago-style pizza restaurant in downtown Ulan Baator or the highlands just outside Luang Prabang. Just fish it up off of Yelp, and send your characters over for a pie and a brew. You can probably view the menu on the restaurant’s web site, look at the street facade through Google, and email the owner for permission to reproduce the sign on the book cover.

But sometimes it is preferable that a place not actually exist in the real world.

COLLABORATORS - Map of Chacarre

For all my readers who love maps, here's the one I drew of Chacarre and surrounding territory. As I wrote Collaborators, I kept a notebook that contained not only story ideas and flow-charts for scenes, but maps and other drawings.

Dotted lines indicate national boundaries. Double lines indicate seacoast. Starred circles are capital cities. The Empty Isles don't have a capital city - they're not nearly organized enough to agree on one. Joosten is also known as the Drowned Lands. The area marked by parallel lines, Demmerle, has historically been part of either Chacarre or Erlind. At the time of the story, it's Chacarran.