“If I’m gonna tell a real story, I’m gonna start with my name” Kendrick Lamar

Today I picked up my work where I left off last week: on my outline for the third book in the Tuscan series. (The first in the series will be out in early September.)

My outline for the third book is almost finished, so I know the plot, but until today I
hadn’t given the new characters names. The “landlord,” the “widow,” the “farmhand” have been stuck on the page as empty titles without character.

“A name is the blueprint of the thing we call character. What’s in a name? Just about
everything we do,” said Morris Mandel.

After my work today, I understand what he meant.

I needed to do some research to discover the characters’ names. The book is set in Italy,
and in Italy, surnames can vary according to region and sometimes according to what sort of work a person does. What if the person is an immigrant? What about her name?

In order to name characters with authenticity, I needed to ask questions: What was the
basic backstory of each character? Did she come from the area about which I’m writing? Did he move into the area from elsewhere in Italy? Or in Europe? He lives in Tuscany, but was he born in Venice? Is she Sardinian? Is he an immigrant from Senegal? Did they both come from the Marche? Were the parents or grandparents tailors? Locksmiths? barons? barbers? I needed to find out.

The day turned out to be a day of meeting new people, people with names that began to yield their characters to me; it was like having a first introduction to strangers. Exchanging names we were beginning to know each other all the better. Today, my characters and I were living in the excitement of these new relationships, relationships that will be long, sometimes difficult, sometimes grief-stricken, often joyous.

These newly named people have stepped into my world, but more importantly, I’ve
stepped into theirs, and today, real people, we set off together to see what will happen.