Who Are All These People?

Photo of a stack of blank composition books and spiral notebooks in purple and yellow.

The other night I went looking for a fresh notebook because there was a project that I am getting into and jotting things down on Post-It Notes just wasn’t going to cut it anymore. Yes, I know they have these things called computers and smart phones and I could probably jot my notes down digitally, but for some of us analog is the only way.

I dug into the bin where I store my treasure trove of notebooks, only to find that the well had run dry. To be clear there were several notebooks in that bin, but all of them had been at least partly filled with my scribbles. The good news is that it’s August, and all the school supplies are on sale. My notebook stash has been replenished, and my project can now have the dedicated notebook it deserves.

In the meantime, I was intrigued by one of the partly filled notebooks I found while on my quest. Well, as it happens I was intrigued by one particular page. It was a list of names, first and last names along with job titles. It was clear from the job titles that these people all worked at a publishing house. It was also clear from the word “protagonist” written beside one of the names that these were characters in a novel that hasn’t yet been written, but beyond that I don’t have a clue who they are.

Generally when I outline new novel ideas, I start with the story and the different scenes. Sometimes I know the main character’s name, but a lot of times I end up filling my note cards (analog junkie, what can I say?) with a lot of initials and placeholders. MC or Protag to indicate the protagonist, LI to indicate the love interest, a lot of characters that are referred to only by words like “neighbor” or “boss” or what have you. This means when it’s finally time to go digital and create a full-fledged outline with the help of Scrivener I then have to finally give all these random people names. Some characters the naming comes easy. Other times I struggle to find the perfect name, spending a lot of time staring off into space as I try to pull the name from the ether or heading to the internet where I scroll through lists of baby names trying to find the perfect one. (Fun fact: back before we did everything online and I worked in a library the baby name books were forever getting declared “missing” after disappearing from the library shelves.)

Sometimes as I’m writing a book or story I will forget the name of a character halfway through or simply decide to start calling the character by a different name. This happened to me just recently with a short story I was revising. The character had started off with the last name Hanes, but then at some point I started writing Hayes and seemed to alternate back and forth between the two names. Thank God for find and replace, and for all The Office fans out there, let’s just hope I don’t wind up with a Dwigt situation!

I find the mysterious notebook page with all these publishing house employees interesting because I seldom give my characters names before I have a pretty decent outline jotted down, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Apparently, these characters were real enough in my head that I felt I had to jot down all their information before actually writing anything about the story they were in. I know this, because I can’t find any notes about the story, and reading the names of these people and their job titles has not jogged my memory in any way. Who are these people? What is their story? Alas, I may never know, but in the meantime there were be dozens more ideas filling up my fresh notebook pages.

—Alissa