The Future of Fictional Characters: What’s In A Name?

Technology Revolution: The Future of Now

Bonnie D Graham

News, Business News, Technology

4.9 • 112 Ratings

🗓️ 13 July 2022

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Buzz 1: “Coming up with a great name for your characters is one of the hardest tasks you’ll ever complete as a fiction writer… going too ‘creative’ with your name choices can distract or even confuse your reader.” (nybookeditors.com) The Buzz 2: “Instead of calling the pizza delivery guy ‘Bob,’ if you give him an interesting ethnicity, a cowboy hat and a name like Galveston Ngyen, readers will remember him when he shows up dead 50 pages later. But beware. There can be pitfalls.” (Anne R. Allen, Naming Fictional Characters) The Buzz 3: “One sci-fi writer recently joked on Twitter that the worst part of publication is being asked by readers and interviewers how to pronounce characters’ names.…” (lithub.com) The Buzz 4: Popular character names: Captain Holly Short from the Artemis Fowl series; Mia Thermopolis from The Princess Diaries; Maggie from Inkheart. (www.bustle.com) We’ll ask writers Catriona McPherson, Clea Simon, Carolyn Marie Wilkins, Sarah Smith and Edwin Hill for their take on The Future of Fictional Characters: What’s In A Name?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Where does yesterday's future, which is already here, really here, really here, meet today's future, which is about to happen, and tomorrow's future, which could be just minutes away?
0:16.2	Welcome to Technology Revolution, the future of now.
0:30.2	Where host Bonnie D. Graham asks savvy futurists for their predictions about the tech-driven trends that are shaping our future right now.
0:34.2	Here's your host who will take us into the future of now.
0:35.6	Bonnie D. Graham.
0:39.8	Bonnie D. in the house. Happy to be here. Wow, we've got a packed house today.
0:44.6	I've got some interesting people, and we're going to talk about an age-old question. I think Shakespeare posed it at some point in his vast and melodious and melifluous career. What's in a name?
0:50.8	We're going to talk about that. If you're a novelist, if you're a storywriter, if you're a
0:54.8	poet, if you're anybody who writes anything, how do you name your characters? Who are they?
0:59.5	What does a name mean? What inspires you? What makes them special to you and what makes them
1:06.1	special to your readers? I'm getting feedback on somebody's microphone. So I'm going to ask everybody
1:09.7	to mute during my opening here, if you don't mind. Just mute your mics. That'll be helpful a lot. We're
1:14.4	live. Everybody on my panel, wave hello to LinkedIn. We're live on LinkedIn. We're live on Facebook.
1:19.2	Hello, everybody. This is Technology Revolution, the future of now. So let me start with my opening,
1:24.4	and this will be interesting. This will set us up for our topic. So I have a couple of buzz quotes.
1:28.7	As you know, I always do that.
1:29.8	Buzz number one comes from a website called NY Book Editors.
1:34.1	We know that's New York book editors.
1:35.9	What else would it be?com.
1:37.6	And they say, coming up with a great name for your characters is one of the hardest tasks
1:42.7	you'll ever complete as a fiction writer.
1:45.0	Everybody on the panel, is that a yes, everybody not? Yeah, that, okay, we picked a good topic.
	...

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