What's in a name?Visit Nicole C. Kear's website.
I have to disagree with Shakespeare here. I think there’s a lot in a name, as far as fiction is concerned. One of my favorite parts about coming up with a new character is naming them; it’s a priceless opportunity to communicate something essential about the character. Foreverland is heavily inspired by Peter Pan but I wanted to keep the re-telling very modern and very loose, so that readers discover the connection at some point, but not until they’re pretty far into the book. Because of this, I had to keep my references to the source material soft, subtle.
When it came to Jaime, the charismatic, impulsive, unforgettable boy Margaret meets in the park, who’s cut from the same character cloth as Peter Pan, I didn’t want to choose something obvious, like Peter or Pete. The author of Peter Pan is J. M. Barrie (the J is for James) and I immediately thought of Jaime. It felt modern, a little more gender-neutral and it works in Spanish, which was something I was looking for, because Jaime is Latino.
I rejected “Wendy” for the female protagonist of my story because it’s too on the nose. Instead, I discovered...[read on]
Q&A with Nicole C. Kear.
--Marshal Zeringue
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