This post in About.com's Fiction Writing Series is a very useful prompting tool to help you addresses the important aspect of creating believable characters for your stories. It accomplishes this by asking Ten Questions.

Here's one of them:

4. What is your character called?
Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? According to novelist Elinor Lipman, absolutely not: "Names have subtext and identity. If your main characters are Kaplans, you've got yourself a Jewish novel, and if your hero is Smedley Winthrop III, you've given him a trust fund. Nomenclature done right contributes to characterization." Your character's name provides a lot of information -- not only about ethnicity -- but about your character's age, background, and social class.

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