This week I spent two afternoons in voice sessions, which is the best part of my job and the part I have least to do with.

We record at the studio, in a small dark room with a big window in one wall. In the control room sit the voice director, an engineer, and me, in a chair at the back with a script and a pencil and instructions to speak when spoken to. Through the window is the booth, padded and close and very quiet, and in it an actor with headphones, a music stand and a glass of water, reading lines I wrote at my desk months ago.

They don't read them in order. A session goes one character at a time, and the lines come in whatever order the script was built in, so an actor might do a man's death, then his greeting, then a line about the price of rope. They have no game to look at. They have a sentence, a note from me in brackets ("tired, a little rude"), and the director telling them what came just before. And from that, in two or three takes, they make a person.

I'm there to answer questions. How do you say this place name? Is he angry or only loud? Has she met this man before? Mostly nobody asks, and that's how it should be. The director knows what she wants, the actor knows what they're doing, and I'm the person at the back who knows how the story goes and keeps out of the way.

On Thursday they recorded the blacksmith. I wrote about him last summer: four lines, one of which I rewrote eleven times. The actor was older than I'd pictured, with a voice like a door that wants oil, and he read the first three almost as I'd heard them in my head. Then he got to the fourth, the short one, and did something I hadn't thought of. He stopped halfway, for no reason in the text, and finished it more quietly than he'd started, as if he'd changed his mind about saying it and said it anyway. The director turned around to look at me. I nodded. That was the take.

That line belongs to him now. I wrote six words, and he found the place in them where the man hesitates, and that hesitation is who the blacksmith is from here on. I couldn't take it back if I wanted to, and I don't. A line on a page is a set of instructions. It isn't a person until somebody breathes into it, and whoever does the breathing has earned their share.

When I started, I used to feel a small proprietary sting when a line went somewhere I hadn't sent it. That's mostly gone. Now it's the part I wait for: the moment an actor takes something of mine, turns it a quarter turn, and hands it back better than I made it.

What's something you made that somebody else finished?

People sometimes ask how I name characters, as if it's the first thing I do. It's nearly the last.

When I start on someone, they get a placeholder, usually whatever they are: SMITH, or OLD WOMAN AT WELL, or, for one long stretch last spring, MAN WITH OPINIONS ABOUT FENCES. I write them under that for weeks. I write what they want, what they're afraid of, how they talk when they're tired, what they would never say out loud. I write scenes that will never be in the game. I find out whether they're funny. Only when I'd know them across a crowded room do I go looking for what they're called.

The reason is that a name is a decision, and it makes other decisions for you. Call a woman Agatha and she's already somebody's aunt. Call a man Rook and he's already wearing a long coat. If I name someone on the first day, I end up writing toward the name, and the name was only a guess. If I wait, the character tells me. That sounds mystical. It isn't. By the time I know someone well, most names are plainly wrong for them, and choosing among the few that are left is short work.

There are practical reasons too. In a big game, the world has rules for names: which sounds belong to which country, what a farmer is called and what a lord is called. There's a long list of names other writers have already used, and a longer list of names that turn out to mean something rude in one of the languages the game is translated into. Somebody checks. I'm grateful to that somebody every single time.

The risk of waiting is that placeholders stick. Everyone gets used to them. A character I'd called GRUMPY BAKER for two months finally got her real name in January, a good one, and people still call her Grumpy Baker in meetings. One of the artists has written it on her concept art, very small, on the corner of her apron.

I think this is part of why the Earthsea books got so far into me as a kid. In those books your true name isn't something handed to you that you grow into. Someone has to see it in you first. That's the order I believe in. You can't name a person you've never met.

So when you see a character in something I wrote, and the name fits, it's because by then I knew who they were. When it doesn't fit, it's probably because a producer needed it by Friday.

Did your name fit you, or did you grow into it?

Ursula K. Le Guin died on Monday, at home in Portland. She was eighty-eight. I've been carrying it around for two days, trying to work out what to say, and I keep coming back to a library.

I was eleven. It was summer, and my mother, who had the summer off and firm views about children with nothing to do, left me at the downtown library in Duluth most mornings while she ran errands. It's the long, low building on Superior Street that everyone says looks like an ore boat. The children's librarian there knew my mother, which meant she knew me, which meant there was no hiding in the picture books. One morning she put A Wizard of Earthsea in my hands and said, "This one's about a boy who's too proud," in a tone that made me suspect she and my mother had talked.

I read it on the floor between two shelves. I remember the carpet. I remember the moment the boy everyone calls Sparrowhawk is given his true name by a quiet old mage, and learns he must keep it to himself, and tell it only to someone he'd trust with his life. In Earthsea, to know the true name of a thing is to have power over it. A wizard who knows the true name of the sea can calm it. Anyone who knows yours can do as they like with you.

That summer I decided I must have a true name too, and that nobody had bothered to tell me. I spent weeks on it. I wrote candidates in the back of a spiral notebook and crossed them out. I settled on one in August and never told anyone, and the internet isn't getting it either.

What I took from that book, without knowing I was taking anything, was that a name isn't a label. It's the thing itself, or as close as words get. When I'm stuck on a character now, it's often because I'm calling them something that isn't true. More on that another time.

I read the rest of the Earthsea books over the next few years, as the library had them, and when I was older I read her other novels, and her essays, which are as sharp as anything I know about why people tell stories at all. But it's the first one I go back to. A boy makes a terrible mistake out of pride and spends the whole book running from what he's made, and he only gets free of it when he turns around, walks toward it, and calls it by its name.

On the way home tonight I stopped at the branch library on Capitol Hill. They had a copy, an old hardcover with a crack down the spine, and I sat in a chair by the window and read the first chapter until they started turning the lights down.

Did anyone hand you a book at exactly the right age? Who was it?

My mother keeps a notebook of what she reads, so it seems only fair that I keep a list. These are the books I finished this year, roughly in the order I read them, minus the ones I've already forgotten, which says something about them.

• The Trespasser, Tana French. A detective nobody on her squad likes, a case everyone wants closed by the end of the shift, and a narrator so prickly I underlined half the book. I read it in two nights on the bus.
• The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey. An inspector stuck in a hospital bed tries to solve a murder from the fifteenth century with nothing but library books and a portrait. My mother has been telling me to read it since I was fifteen. She was right, and she will want that noted.
• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carré. I read it before his new one came out in September. A spy who has been eased into retirement goes looking for the traitor at the top of his old service, and almost nobody in it says what they mean. You learn to listen to the pauses.
• Still Life, Louise Penny. I read it because my mother did, and now we compare notes on the phone about a village in Quebec where far too many people die for its size.
• Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders. A boy in a crypt and a crowd of ghosts who won't admit they're dead. I didn't know a novel could be built like this. It made me want to write dialogue differently, and I've been trying all fall.
• The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro. I read it after he won the Nobel in October, which is a lazy reason, and I'm glad I did. A butler spends a whole book not saying one thing, and you hear it on every page. I thought of the blacksmith.
• Magpie Murders, Anthony Horowitz. A mystery novel inside a mystery novel, with the last chapter missing. Clever enough that it ought to be annoying, and it isn't.
• Bluebird, Bluebird, Attica Locke. Two bodies in a small East Texas town, and a Black Texas Ranger who knows exactly what the town thinks of him. Sharp and sad, with a sense of place you can smell.
• Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward. Not a mystery, though there's a ghost. I read it in November and it hasn't let go of me.
• The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler. My yearly reread. Marlowe at his most worn out and his most decent. I don't think anyone has written a better friendship that goes wrong.

Ten books, which is fewer than I'd like and more than I feared in October.

One more thing. Sue Grafton died this week. My mother called me when she heard. She has the alphabet down the margin of a page in her notebook, checked off through Y, which came out in August, and Grafton's family has said there won't be a Z. I asked if she'd cross the Z off. She said a librarian doesn't erase, and she'll leave it as it is.

What was the best thing you read this year?

I flew back from Duluth this afternoon. Thanksgiving at my mother's: the two of us, a turkey breast instead of a turkey because there's no sense in the other thing, and her pumpkin pie, which is better than anyone's and which she claims is the recipe off the can.

Every time I go home I walk down to the lake first thing. This time it was the morning after I landed, before she was up, down the hill to the Lakewalk in the dark with my hands pulled into my sleeves. The lake in November isn't the lake on the postcards. It's the color of a cast-iron pan. It doesn't look like water so much as like weather that's lying down.

November is when the lake turns. Everyone who grows up on it knows about the gales of November, partly from Gordon Lightfoot, and partly because they're real. The water is still holding some of the summer's warmth, the air coming down out of Canada holds none, and the wind can come across hundreds of miles of open water with nothing in its way. The Edmund Fitzgerald went down in a November storm in 1975, on the tenth, with all twenty-nine men aboard. She'd taken on her load at Superior, just across the bay from us. Kids in Duluth know that before they know their times tables.

My father was an engineer on the ore boats for most of my life. The season runs from spring until the locks close in January, so November was always the month he was away and the weather was worst. I remember my mother at the kitchen window on gale nights, not doing anything, only standing there with a dish towel. I remember the marine forecast on the radio, which she'd turn up, and a man reading out wave heights in a voice like he was reading a grocery list. I didn't understand then that she was listening for the name of his boat, and hoping not to hear it.

Some years he was home for Thanksgiving and some years he wasn't, and we never knew until the week before. When he wasn't, we ate anyway, and she set his place, and nobody mentioned it. When he was, he slept for most of a day, then came downstairs and carved the turkey like a surgeon and talked about the lake the way you'd talk about a difficult relative you admired.

He's been gone eleven years. My mother doesn't set his place anymore. But on Thursday I noticed she had the radio on in the kitchen, low, the way she used to, and when I asked about it she said she liked the company.

I stood on the Lakewalk a long time that first morning. A boat was waiting out past the piers for its turn under the bridge, lit up like an office building lying on its side. I thought about the men aboard it, and whoever was at home listening to the forecast for them, and how strange it is that a place can be so beautiful and so willing to kill you at the same time.

What did the place you grew up teach you to be afraid of?