It sounds ridiculous, but for me, the hardest part of any book isn't the plan or the plot or the setting, but working out what the characters are called. The house is littered with Baby Name books, to the point where my mother's constantly wondering if there's something I'm not telling her. My favourite guilty resource is an English classic from the early 90s, which shamelessly divides names into stereotypes - brainy, classic, dated, swash-buckling heroine, tree-hugging hero. I much prefer it to my other regular, a more modern book, which tells you which nouns you can turn into babynames, and states quite unequivocally that Hester is 'too uncool to inflict on any child'.

It's not even a matter of picking names you like for your characters, either. I mean, I adore the colour purple but I'm under strict and despairing instructions not to paint our new house in 'shades of bruise' just because I can't resist picking up paint tins with the word 'violet' written on them. (Oooh. Violet. Note to self: good heroine name) If I called all my characters my favourite names, every single book would be about Bonham and Dora and they'd persist in doing absolutely nothing. And of course you can't use the names of your friends, particularly the men - they're already convinced I'm writing about them anyway, so to call the romantic hero Hugo or Nat would have them running for a restraining order.

The right name for the girl you're rooting for through the novel has to be unusual enough for her to stand out from the romantic crowd of Katies and Tillys, but not irritatingly so; I can't warm to a heroine with a kooky nickname right off. It always feels lazy, as if the author wants to tell me just how ker-razy she is, without actually showing me why. I think I'll be the judge of just how maaad she is, thanks. And yet the subtle connotations of certain names can help to fix a character from the first chapter, so it has to be right. I can see the characters in my head straight away, but for some reason, the names don't always come with them; in that respect, I suppose I'm a bit like a very incompetent medium. Nelson Barber and Melissa Romney-Jones I got straight away, but Jonathan Riley was called something very different for the first draft of The Little Lady Agency - and it took a long conversation with a patient American friend to fix on just the right combination. I won't even start on the minefield of UK perceptions vs US ones. That's a whole other kettle.

Over the last few weeks I've been writing madly, and driving my very patient agent, Lizzy, mad, demanding more and more names from her - and rejecting most of them. The story is well underway, and I have my moody hero sorted out (Fraser), I have the heroine's bossy sister (Rosie), I have Rosie's super-polite boyfriend (Douglas), I have her smooth-talking boss (Max) - I just need to find the right name for my chestnut-haired, antique-loving, clutter-junkie, bespectacled heroine.

This morning, I'm going to turn to the ultimate name-finding oracle and decide: The Times births, deaths and marriages section. It hasn't let me down yet.


Get more on Hester Browne at SimonandSchuster.com