I was asked about naming characters. My first reaction was “it doesn’t matter.” On second thought, I realized it does matter. A surname, family name, can indicate a country of origin. Along our southern border Spanish names are common. If you come north all the way to Minnesota, Scandinavian names are common. A character living in Minnesota with a Spanish surname might suggest someone out of place. A reader might think that’s a strange name for Minnesota. You have unconsciously warned the reader of someone out of place.
To find a list of the family names for a particular region, just use the search feature built into all the browsers; i.e., Scandinavian surnames or Spanish surnames. They can even keep you out of trouble. Beck is a Scandinavian name, but isn’t as common as Bjerke. It pays to be careful in naming characters. I used a main character whose name was Gear. It was explained that a younger sibling couldn’t pronounce her name and it came out sounding like “gear.” The spellchecker would tell me Gear shouldn’t be capitalized many times over in the novel. Every now and then it would just flag Gear as a misspelling. By the end of writing the novel, I was sick and tired of the name Gear.
