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Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hello, Secrets and lies, fam. It's Carolyn again.
I wanted to talk to you guys today about a struggle I have when I am working on a new story, or in this case, I am adding some things to my current novel and I'm getting ready to start a new one.
I have a real problem trying to name my characters, and I'm wondering if this is something that other writers struggle with too.
I find when I just leave it up to, you know, my imagination and my thoughts of the moment, that almost all of my character names start with an M. For some reason. I'm sure that must mean something psychologically, like when you dream of flying or something, that I am naming all of my characters M names.
So I'm curious about what other people do for resources for naming characters. Do you have like a name list of cool names that interest you that you refer to last time I was working on a short story last month that I submitted for consideration for the Boucher Con anthology for this next year's event in New Orleans. And I was writing a New Orleans story and I had nowhere. I had a good, you know, I.
[00:01:44] Speaker B: Had my idea about what I wanted to do as far as the story.
[00:01:50] Speaker A: Itself and the plot, and that worked out okay. But I really struggled trying to come up with names for the character, so much so that it slows me down. It's a distraction for me. So what I did is I asked my Facebook friends to suggest names for me and they came through, of course, most of them sincerely giving me a lot of interesting names. Some of them even trying to accommodate the New Orleans location of the story with location appropriate names or the likelihood of maybe a little Cajun influence or something there. So that works. But that doesn't seem like a really good long term plan. Every time I want to jot down.
[00:02:50] Speaker B: A new story in the past, I would fall back on something like flipping through a baby names book or something, which I can tell you gets real weird when family comes to visit or you have it with your things and co workers or bi or whatever, that I have a baby names book, but that doesn't work out all that well either because it's like decision paralysis a little bit. So anyway, I've also found that when friends are like, oh my gosh, use my name. Use my name in the book. Use my name. That's great.
I feel a little bit weird if I make that character a, an idiot or a murderer or a victim or as actually happened, a widower, his. His wife, my friend's wife was none too Pleased about that.
So that's a little bit strange.
Yeah. And we are about to start again. I have a new project that I'm getting ready to kick off and I am again going to require names for all of my characters and I think I will be forced to go back to the list that I gathered when I was working on the last story that people sent me. Their suggestions to get started at least.
I also considered naming all of my characters some sort of derivation of my fantasy football team, but that seems a little strange.
Anyway, I am. I am wondering what you guys do when you are coming up with characters for stories or what other writers you follow do. I know that at some of the conferences, Vouchercon in particular, but I think they do this at Malice Domestic too, when they have silent auctions and such to raise money for local libraries or something. They will auction off getting having your name be in a book.
So people are into that. I'm wondering other writers if you also have some trepidation about who those characters are. Do you, you know, you make sure they're friendly like witnesses or what. I write crime fiction. So yeah.
So anyway, I would love to hear about your thoughts if you drop me a line in Facebook on the Our Secrets and Lies Facebook page and let me know, let me know what you do and what you think and if you're aware of other resources. I am all for that too.
Last time, last episode, I shared that I was tinkering with Autocrit and Novel Pad and I still am. And I have to say that the tools that are out there are getting better and better and better. And I know that there are a lot of writers who are totally freaked out by the thought of. Of AI tools and what that means for writers and people, you know, doing a couple clicks and generating really, really crappy ebooks and dumping them on Amazon. And yeah, I'm sure that that happens, but I have been trying to learn about AI tools and I find it really, really fascinating.
I'm really enjoying it and I'm not using it for writing stories, but I will use it for things like, you know, create a, an image of. And then I'll describe the scene that is in one of my stories and the. They'll generate an image for me and it's amazing. I will be thinking about. Yeah, that's the mood I'm looking for in, in this story, obviously for my short stories and in my short story collection. I don't have them illustrated. There's. There are no pictures from any of these stories. But I, I'm having such a good time learning how to use chat gbt4 and I created an image for one.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: Of the stories that was in my.
[00:08:17] Speaker B: My sort of office horror story collection called White Noise. And I love it. It's not exactly the way I had pictured it in my mind when I wrote that story, but it works. It really works. And so I'm, I'll, I'll link to that picture or I'll, I'll share that picture on the Secrets and Lies page as well, so you can take a look at it. And I'll probably maybe correct, collect or create an image for some of the other stories that are in that collection and maybe even a couple of other stories that I have that are in other places just to give you kind of the feeling about what that story is, about what that mood is there. So. Because it's really a lot of fun.
So the other thing that, that these AI tools do, and I, again, I understand it's a little creepy and, and there are some concerns about using these kinds of tools in an ethical way, not wanting to take advantage of in particular creative people's ideas and use them in a, in an unethical way or anything like that. But I'm finding it really useful for things like coming up with promotional posts or pitch ideas for work that I've already done that's already created and trying to, you know, getting suggestions about how to get the word out on things and organizing things. The, the autocrit tool that I talked about last time does what they call a reverse outline. So they will actually analyze the structure of the story that you have already written and give you an idea about how it's organized, let you know if there are gaps, and it gives you insights if you, if you ask it for, you know, can I punch up my characters? Can I punch up my setting? It will give you some suggestions and give you some ideas about where you might think about doing that. And I find that super helpful. It doesn't mean that I am using a tool to, to make those changes. It's just giving me some visibility into the structure of my work.
I didn't do a very good job outlining that novel. I believe that that makes me a pantser, as they say, writing from the, you know, the seat of your pants, rather than being a plotter where you work out all of the story points or the main story points in advance.
But one of the things that NovelPad does too, since I'm now starting on a new project, is that it's A much better visual tool for helping me do the organization that I want to do in advance. Right now my new project, Story Ideas are literally on a whiteboard in my office.
And I have the things that I don't want to forget in a, like a bullet point list.
And I have some general, general themes.
[00:12:05] Speaker A: And ideas and some character ideas and some possible plot twist ideas in there, but I don't have it organized in any kind of tool that also allows me to write. And that's one of the things that Novelpad will let me do. So I will probably get that started fairly soon.
I put a call out to my local community to see if there are any, I don't know, former camp counselors or anyone who owns there. There are a whole bunch of summer camps around here and my next project is going to be set largely at a former summer camp turned writing retreat space. And so to get the sort of flavor and atmosphere of that, I'm hoping that one of my local summer camp folks will let me, I don't know, walk around a little bit, get a, get a feel for the space and the atmosphere there, select some details and then of course share with me their experiences at the summer camp to help make my story feel a little bit more authentic. So I will be working on that coming up.
In the meantime, we are between holidays. As you know, we had a post Hurricane Helene Thanksgiving which actually was very nice. It was very quiet and very nice. We had offered up some Thanksgiving support to other members of our neighborhood who may have had damage to their house or anything else that might make this very difficult for them to host their own meal.
But everyone seems to, seems to be doing okay in my little community here.
So we had a nice Thanksgiving holiday, a nice quiet week and I feel like I really, really needed that. So, so that was great. And now we are gearing up for Christmas and I am excited to have an old friend come to visit this coming weekend. We have our old fashioned Christmas getting ready to happen this weekend in Hendersonville and it's. I went last year for the first time and it really is just wonderful.
Lots of charm, lots of holiday spirit, lots of goodwill towards men and Santa and llamas. Christmas llamas, really.
[00:15:11] Speaker B: So.
[00:15:14] Speaker A: If you are interested in checking out a local North Carolina small business small town holiday festivity, please do. I recommend it.
Support our local small businesses. They could really use our help. Now everyone is in recovery mode.
It's beautiful here and a wonderful place and time to visit. So if you have the inclination, absolutely do. Otherwise there are links you can look up if you are looking for holiday gifts.
Lots of local makers nearby, local Asheville, Black Mountain, Hendersonville businesses that you can support by you know, by distance by over the Internet ordering gifts for them.
If you are stuck trying to find interesting and fun things for your writer friends or mystery loving friends, you can find links to some of my favorite gifts that I have tracked down on the Secrets and Lies page as well.
Also on my website and on my blog grounds for suspicion blogspot.com so I will leave it at there. I really hope you guys have some good suggestions for me as far as character naming and what has worked for you in the past. Right now I either am stuck on names that are just too plain, that are not interesting enough, or they get to be a little too crazy and it sounds like I'm casting for a soap opera or something. So any help you can provide as far as good suggestions for naming characters, I am all for it.
As always. Happy writing. Happy reading. Share any really, really awesome reads that you would recommend to others in the comments as well. On the Secrets and Lies page, we're always looking for what's the next great read and I will also share with you a new truth or Fiction game and we will see how good you guys are at determining what's the truth and what is the lie.
All right, if I do not get the chance to talk with you again before Christmas and Hanukkah, have wonderful holiday season again.
Peace and love to everyone. Thanks so much for all of your support for sharing our podcast with others, for sharing our links and our games and our social media presence with others. I so appreciate all of you. Have a wonderful, wonderful rest of your year.
