Great post!

I think character names are crucial, and I spend quite a lot of time chosing mine. But I love the process. It's like finding the key to the character. Naming a character the wrong thing can seriously derail the planning stage. Often if you have problems motivating or understanding a character changing the name can make a huge difference.

I find it a bit annoying that in movies the characters often have bland, interchangeable names (how many characters call Jack has Harrison Ford played, I wonder?) But perhaps it doesn't matter so much as in the novel, when the name confronts you constantly?

There is also an interesting difference in names usage between the US and the UK. I remember reading a crime novel by Elizabeth George, an American writer who sets her detective fiction in the UK. Usually she is pitch perfect, but this novel was set in an English boarding/public school and had a boy called Kevin in it (I think he was a suspect so quite an important character) but that just ruined it for me, because no middle class boy in the UK would be called that, although it's a perfectly ok middle class name in the US.

Names are always fun and important to me. But I'm finding more and more that I tend to always change names later on in the writing stages. They tend to start off bland, much like the characters too. So like you said Scott, it's a good sign that the characters are coming alive.

I like the example from Goonies. Everyone has a nickname, and it's very clearly correlated humorously with the characters, so they are even more memorable.

When thinking about choosing names, I now always recall this humorous scene from Gentlemen Broncos...
http://video.yahoo.com/watch/6299399/16340708

I must admit, I do get hung up on names. But it's usually in the prep period that I concentrate on it. I can't bring myself to use a filler name, turning this person into a thing, just a character. I have to have the history and name before I can write them. Part of my process I guess.

I definitely go through the alphabet and find that different beginning letters can give different connotations as well, which is interesting. I think "Sins of the Scapegoat" was the first time I've given names to characters and really thought the names worked and were meaningful. Though they might be a little OTN, I like giving a tragic detective the name "Catcher" just to be cruel, or a warrior(serial killer) for God the name Gabriel. It evokes the idea but is actually ironic, so it puts an automatic flaw in the character from the start.

Avoiding names that start with the same letter as another character is also important for clarity for the reader. It's easy to mix up who is saying what when the names start with the same letter or even have the same length--like JOHN and JACK and JOAN. On the page, when you're reading quickly, it can cause confusion, make the reader re-read chunks of dialogue and possibly make them not want to read more.

I hope some posters from the Done Deal board read this. I was so surprised at how casual some of them were about this whole issue.
Because it's very important to me, and the name does evoke a lot about the person.

[...] the wisdom of the advice that I had ignored for so many years, I decided to hit up a few different writing resources online, distilling their advice into a few general rules of thumb that I continue to [...]