Naming characters for me is either super-hard or super-easy, never in-between. Sometimes the name and the character come together; sometimes nothing seems right, or I doubt my choice.
This week I found a way to test the name. On Google Image search now, you can type in the kind of image you're looking for, so I tried the names I'd thought of for the character with "Face" as the image type.
I can't claim that this changed my mind in any way -- I had a favorite name and found myself searching for images that fit it. But, I did find one face that seemed exactly right -- as soon as I saw it, I thought:
"That's her!"
Maybe it helped, or maybe my mind was already made up and I just didn't know it.
It was also interesting (to me) to see often the names seemed to attract a TYPE: look at Ashley (above) and Margaret (below). Neither of these were names I was considering -- I just looked up lots to see if there really is anything to do this idea. Maybe there isn't and it's just my imagination --but still, a character's name matters -- it gives the reader a mental image of the person.
These Margarets were the first three rows that came up when I entered the name, as were the Ashleys above.
