What's In A Name?

What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Every author of fiction knows that Shakespeare was dead wrong about this, at least when it comes to naming characters. We may agonize over our hero or heroine's name, or it may come to us in a flash of inspiration, but it just has to be right. Changing a name once chosen is no trifling matter. Sometimes a character clings to a name a stubbornly as we do to our own.

Every author has their own way of choosing names. Baby name books,...