The time has come to unveil why the lead character of my new novel Karma is named Silke Butters.
First, a little background on how characters are named. It’s different for every writer. Some writers just have the names of their characters come to them in a dream, or whispered on the winds of legend. Some name characters after people they know in reality. And others painstakingly go through baby books and online name generators to capture the perfect name for their character, as if they were naming their child.
In a way, these are our children. We’ve given birth to each character, breathed life into them, and raised them to be the upstanding (or vile) individuals they are. No matter how you come up with the name for your characters, they should be specific to their character, especially if you’re going to be spending a lot of time with them as is the case with a series. You don’t want your character to be saddled with a name that you can’t stand writing, or one that is hard to remember how to spell. Even worse is when you hear a name in your head a certain way, but when readers ask you about them they pronounce the name a totally different way.
I’ve named a lot of my characters variations on names that I’ve heard somewhere before. I have a notebook of writing related resources and in this notebook, I jot down names I hear that I think would be good to use for a character later.
The name Silke Butters is such a name. The moment I heard it, I knew it was going to be used for my leading lady. However, at the time I did not know Silke was going to manifest into Karma, a kickass superhero with light blasting from her hands!
But back up…who is Silke Butters?
As writers, we take on many different jobs, and wear many different hats just to get by. I used to work at a hotel/casino gym, and attached to the gym was the spa area. Guests would come to check in for various treatments to use the spa or the fitness center and I could see the check-in area through my little glass bubble of the gym where my good friend Maki (who has also found her way into the Silke series) would check people in. One day, Maki was going through the check-in cards when she ran across a peculiar name. She motioned me out to look at it and on the card, it read: SILKE BUTTERS.
We pondered for a long while whether this was a real name or if someone had checked in under a false identity. In Las Vegas hotels, this happens more often than you think. For instance, Katie Perry once checked in as Sophie King Awesome as a clever way to throw off anyone who might be trying to find out where she was staying. Maki and I finally decided that Silke Butters must be an exotic dancer or the equivalent. That might be why I made her a supermodel. The truth is, I can’t really remember why I start Silke in the world of high-fashion modeling, but what I do know is that now I couldn’t see her as anything else.
Characters are born of our creative instincts but often they take on a life of their own. The entire plot line of the Silke Butters series manifested from something else totally unrelated to what the final product now is. But, I had fun playing in this world and I look forward to venturing back into it. What other way can I have someone give everybody a nickname revolving around food without sounding ridiculous? Only within the pages of a good story can you have such glorious freedom.
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