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Naming the Baby

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One of my least favorite tasks in writing fiction is naming my characters. I know, I know, it SHOULD be fun and easy and well, fun.

For me, it isn’t.

I either AGONIZE over a name and drive myself crazy or I flip open the phone book and chose the first name my finger lands on. I figure I can always change it later, right?

Well naming a character really is something to think about. Often times, without even meaning to, a character’s name will influence her character traits, personality, and the theme of the story.

I still hate naming characters.

Honestly, one of my go-to methods for naming a character is to ask my mom. I give her a snippet about the character, how I see him acting, what he looks like, and some basic framework of the story (sci-fi or romance, action or historic) and let her do her thing. After teaching for THIRTY YEARS she’s got a great name database in her head.

If you’re not so lucky, here are five websites to help you with names!

Social Security Administration: Popular Baby Names by Year
You can set the year of birth and get anywhere from the top 20 to the top 1,000 names in that year

BehindTheName.com
Not only the top names by year, but also by region.

NameTrends.net
Remember the movie “Heathers”? Not just the trends of an individual name, but also about over-reaching trends.

Parents.com
Another resources for regional names.

Meaning-of-Names.com
Because sometimes knowing the name is time-frame appropriate just isn’t enough!

So when you’re picking your names here are my top five tips:

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Three Quick Ways to Write Your Rough Draft

It happens to us all, we want to publish an eBook but writing a book seems like such a huge, daunting, overwhelming task with the biggest question being “How do I come up with all the content?”

Here are three quick and easy ways to generate the first-draft of your eBook.

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1. Transcribe a class you’ve already taught.

Most business owners have some form of content already. Maybe it’s an audio or a video training, Or even just a series of PowerPoint slides. You can use this as the framework for an eBook. And you’ll find that BAM! A large portion of your content is already created for you.

A word of warning: Do NOT just publish a transcript! We speak very differently than good writing. Don’t believe me? Read a transcription without listening to the audio. It’s very hard to follow what the speaker is talking about.

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Product Review: Writer’s Blocks

I’m a HUGE fan of anything that will spark creativity, storytelling, and basically just get me unstuck in my writing. Even though I primarily write non-fiction, sometimes taking an hour or so to work on a fiction piece can just get the words flowing.

And sometimes just THINKING about fiction stories will do it!

Just so we’re 100% clear: I think fiction is way harder than non-fiction. I have the greatest respect for fiction authors. And since my video project is within a week of being completely finished, I’m rapidly running out of excuses to avoid starting the novel.

So when I got an email from Writer’s Digest saying that they had these little six-sided dice guaranteed to get your writing juices flowing, I was all in.

They are very similar to a tool I made a million years ago called a story machine. Basically you come up with two decks of index cards, one with occupations and one with situations. Pull a card from each deck and whamo! write a story about it. The problem was that I had to come up with the ideas for both decks of cards. AND, after playing with it for a while, it wasn’t really a “random” story. It just wasn’t easy enough to create permutations.

Enter “Writer’s Blocks”

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There are four six-sided cubes:

Green – genre
Orange – plot twist
Red – protagonist
Blue – plot archetype

Sounds pretty straight forward, fun and easy, right?

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