While deciding on the best names for your characters is not as critical as naming your children and your pets, it does require a considerable amount of thought. After all, you will be living with these characters for quite some time, especially if you write series. I spend the most time choosing my protagonist's name for obvious reasons. My sleuths are always female. I like to give them names I consider appealing and not very common, along with a nickname. In Giving Up the Ghost, my sleuth Gabriela Meyerson is called Gabbie. In Murder a la Christie, Lexie's official name is Alexa. My sleuth in Death on Dickens Island is Cordelia Dickens, though everyone calls her Delia.
However, not all my characters are happy with their given names. Carrie Singleton, in the Haunted Library series, officially changed her name to Carrie because she always hated Carolinda, which she was given at birth.
The names of my other characters usually come to mind as they're about to become active members of the cast. I do my best to vary them, with regard to the starting letter and number of syllables. Masculine names tend to be shorter, and so I choose names with different vowel sounds. Readers are less likely to confuse two characters named Mike and Brett, while having characters named Fred and Ted in the same book might be a problem for some. But names can get mixed up even in an author's mind. I am grateful to the editor who noticed that I'd changed the murderer's name in the middle of the novel.
Recently, I've been having fun with names in a different way entirely. In the book I'm currently writing, Delia and her son Connor adopt two kittens that are littermates. I decided to call them Romeo and Juliet after my own kitties. And when Connor and his friend Trevor acquire girlfriends, I named them after my granddaughter and her "sister." Boy, was Livvie excited when I told her about that!
We authors have total control when it comes to naming our characters. What do you take into consideration when you name yours?
