I have always taken great pleasure in naming my fictional characters. The act of naming them goes a long way in bringing them to life. In the service of this I have collected several “name your baby” books that I often consult in the process. I look for names that are appropriate to the nationality and ancestry of the character, names whose meanings are in line with the character’s role in the story, names with the right degree of formality or informality, names in the right place on the spectrum of oddity. The name has to be one I can live with for a year, or two, or three. It has to be memorable. Above all, it has to sound right. Emory Bellew. Cadence Miller. Morgan Gyorgy.

Once I’ve named a character she takes up residence in my brain in the same way a friend does. I think about her, want to stay in touch, want to find out what she’s doing and thinking.

I’ve always thought of my characters as entirely unique people, people I’ve birthed with DNA and names all their own. But when I was writing my last novel a story question prompted me to google one of my characters—and I discovered that someone named Audra Vandermeer really is out there. I was stunned. I immediately googled some of my other characters, and it turned out many of them are out there too. Hayden Risley. Renata Dengler. Skylar Stone. These people I thought I invented have counterparts in the real world, people with addresses and phone numbers and lives that are not the ones I’ve imagined for them.

What a thrilling and horrifying discovery. At first I wondered if I was in dangerous territory and should change the names. But then I thought—no. This is the perfect metaphor for what it is to write fiction. I am writing about what’s out there, a big wide educated guess based on my experience and the overall experience of being human, and so I should not be surprised if it turns out to be real, in terms of names, yes, but also in terms of all the difficulties life coughs up, all the annoyances and incongruities, all the grief and losses, all the joys. None of what we writers imagine is exactly new, writing is more a question of synthesizing and reordering the building blocks of human experience to find new shapes and patterns. So it shouldn’t surprise me when there turns out to be a Varney Miller, or an Angus Risley, or a Nelda Stone out there. That is precisely as it should be. Let’s get to know each other.