Names

To me, one of the hardest things about writing is coming up with names. I rarely think of names first, and I'm not the kind of person who will just pull out the phonebook and name characters random names in the book. I have to think about them. A lot of my characters names tend to be extremely obscure references. For example:

• the name of Jaden's closeted co-worker, Mel, is a reference to Mel Blanc, voice actor of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, et al.
• Arthur Maltese, Todd's boyfriend, is a reference to one of the Looney Tunes script writers and to the voice actor of Elmer Fudd. 
• Alice Yamagishi, another one of Jaden's coworkers,  is a reference to Ryoko Yamagishi, who wrote one of the earliest yuri.
• Terra Aelfdene is a reference to a Final Fantasy character
• Joan Maloney is a reference to Joan Jett and Samantha Maloney

So on and so forth. For a science fiction story I have been writing, it's even harder to come up with names. I didn't want the characters to have names that actually exist, because it wouldn't make sense in context. But I didn't want to just string a bunch of useless syllables together and call it a name. I ended up taking words from various languages and turning them into names.

Defying Stereotypes

I am excruciatingly bored with walking stereotypes. Everytime I see a character who does nothing but be a stereotype, I am immediately turned off and lose interest. I cannot possibly see how anyone would find them entertaining or interesting. Naturally, this means that I will never write a character like that intentionally, unless I'm parodying that stereotype. I don't care if "there's some truth in every stereotype". I will not write them. I hate those characters.

It's possible of course to write character who suits a stereotype and have them be a well-written and interesting character.  I do not automatically hate every gay character who is flamboyant, or every female character who is weak and needy. It's a good opportunity to examine that stereotype and how it affects people and their perceptions of others, or how it affects those that are being stereotyped. People rarely do it right however.

Probably a good test to see whether or not your character is well-written is to see if you can sum up everything people need to know about that character in a single phrase. If you can, your character needs more work.

Introduction to the Series

Conventional Friends is a webcomic that I am and have been working on for several months now. It's the story of Jaden, his friends and family, the friends and family of those people, and holy crap, this series already has twenty-eight characters and I haven't even started it yet. *facepalm*

Originally, I hadn't meant to focus so much on Jaden, it just sort of happened that way. He became a very fascinating character, with several different layers and facets of his personality, who continues to surprise me. It's by no means ready for mass consumption, there's a lot of kinks in the characters that I need to work out, and in a series like this, where the characters are pretty much the only thing carrying the series, the characters absolutely have to be pretty damn well written. Personally, one of my biggest problems with the series at the moment is that I simply cannot seem to pull my attention away from Jaden. With TWENTY-SEVEN other characters, it would seem like he couldn't get a bunch of screentime, but he gets a lot of it.

My other problem with the series seems to be with tone. I keep flip-flopping between traditional comic strip humor and ultra-melodramatic and its making me crazy. I have problems with shows that do that (cough cough Black Butler) however, i see it a lot in webcomics, such as Questionable Content and Something Positive, so I'm wondering if the medium of comic strips is one that make that mood whiplash possible to do without looking utterly stupid