Jackie W asked: How do you decide on what names to give your characters? And has any of your characters names turned out to cause problems for you afterwards?
A: I love naming my characters! It’s like having a child again, except I get to see what they’re like fully grown. For a long time, I used the names of my children, and good friends, morphing the characters of course so they didn’t in the least resemble them, but just because I wanted to involve them in my stories. But a girl has only so many friends…so I then began to name characters based on character qualities I found in searched like BabyName.com, or others. I really like finding a name that I feel fits the personality of the person I’m writing about, hence why I pick names with meaning to them. I usually go to a baby name site and search according to meaning and nationality. Then you’ll find me saying them over and over until I finally find one that rolls off the tongue well and makes me see the character in my mind.
As for causing problems…once, through happenstance, I named a character in a book similar to a person I later met with a similar job. Unfortunately, she had read my book, and because my character was a villain, somehow thought I’d meant her! I did point out that I didn’t know her when I wrote the book…And of course, once I named a SAR dog after my sister.
I thought it was cute.
Yeah, she didn’t. Oh well.
(Susan May Warren spent the summer collecting “Ask and Author Anything!” questions, about life, writing and anything (within reason) her readers asked. Stop back every week this winter to read the answers to those questions!)