How do you come up with character names?

Coming up with character names is a process that takes me a lot of time and if it isn’t done I feel like I can’t go on. I need to know the character’s name and the character’s name just has to feel right.

I wind up going through a huge amount of names until I find the name and once I say the name, I say “Yes,” that’s that character and that’s who they are.

Otherwise writing about them gives me itchy skin because it’s like I’m not really writing about them yet, but once they have that perfect name, I can go on and I can just get them in a way that that I felt I was edging up on them before.

So for me, naming is something that is really important and often I’ll find that a character or a secondary character doesn’t have quite the right name and I’ll wind up changing it and have a strange feeling of relief. It’s like “okay, okay I got it that time.”