WHAT DO YOU CALL A MAN WITH NO NAME? by Victoria Cornwall

I am one of those writers who prefers to plot out a novel before I begin to write. It stops me from going down an avenue that I can't get out off, going off piste or forgetting where I am in the story if I take a short break. I felt confident in this foolproof method ... until I wrote The Daughter of River Valley.

Despite plotting the story, I soon discovered I had a major problem I did not plan for. I was only a few pages in at the time and I knew I had several hundred to go before the problem would be solved. "What on earth was the problem?" I hear you ask.

At the beginning of the story Beth Jago, the feisty heroine, finds an intruder in her home. Acting on instinct, she does what any feisty gal would do, she knocks him out with a frying pan. The intruder, which just happens to be our handsome hero, soon regains consciousness, but it quickly becomes apparent that he is very unwell and has no clue who he is. He has lost his memory, cannot recall why he is in Beth's house and, more importantly, who he is. Yes, that's right, he has forgotten his name.

This is the main thrust of the story. Who is this intruder? Will he die? Will Beth be arrested for murder? Should Beth care for him until he recovers? Can she trust him? Is he as dangerous as his nightmares suggest?

So I was happily typing away when I came up with my first problem, namely what do I call him if I don't want to reveal who he really is? Each time he spoke I couldn't simply tag his words with his name, so I had to resort to typing the man/stranger/intruder.  There was a limit to how many times I could use said the man or the man replied. I feared that using the man might form a barrier between the reader and the character and I certainly didn't have the energy (or motivation) to use it for several hundred pages. It's difficult to feel as if you are getting to know someone if you don't even know their name. What was I to do? Simple ... let one of the characters give him a temporary name, thought I.

A temporary name seemed the perfect solution, but even this has its pitfalls. There is the risk of the reader bonding with a character who has one name, then feeling a little disconnected when it is finally revealed what he is really called. Imagine reading Pride and Prejudice, you have bonded with Elizabeth, the heroine, for several hundred pages, yet towards the end of the book you discover she is called Annabelle. There is a slight disconnect, a feeling she is not exactly the same woman you have accompanied through the novel. It was something I wanted to avoid, yet it seemed impossible not to.

So it was a conundrum. How did I solve it? You will have to read The Daughter of River Valley to find out, but the first thing I had to do was go back to the drawing board and re-plot parts of the story. Will I write another story which involves memory loss? I don't plan to, but you know what they say ... the best laid plans ...

The Daughter of River Valley is available in the following formats:-

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Victoria Cornwall