There is a thin line between writing for yourself and writing for others. If you are sincere about writing for yourself, there is a sense of urgency straining to get the concept down in enough detail so that the material lives as a vibrant set of notes for you to reconsider at a later time. If you are writing for others there is more likely to be some rhetorical device such as irony or question, beckoning you and a potential reader into the labyrinth created by the collision of ideas. Worst of all, if you are writing to show off, there will be name dropping and stunning flights of vocabulary, each a testament to acquaintances. Thus this warning to yourself: You do not have to convince anyone how many persons or words you know, merely an eagerness to listen, to engage in conversation or argument. Or more briefly, ideas--not fustian.

There is by now a built-in detector of such things that catches you on the second or third pass, surely the fourth. One by one, names of friends are set aside unless their inclusion is a part of some joke, naming, for instance, a grammar school in a short story the James D. Wolfe Elementary school, which sounds sincere and real enough; after all, you attended the john Hancock grammar school in Los Angeles and the John Howland grammar school in Providence, RI; your junior high schools were named after an educator, Ida M. Fisher, in Miami Beach, and a naturalist, John Burroughs, in Los Angeles. Why wouldn't James D. Wolfe hold up, even if he is in real life the creator and head writer of Laugh-In? But naming a grammar school after a friend brings the school to life, just as naming a seller of Chinese replica wrist watches Conrad Burnaby amuses you no end because in real life Barnaby Conrad knowingly wears a Rolex replica he bought for five dollars on a trip to China.

It is difficult to tell for sure how some of your friends get into your stories; perhaps the guiding principal is mischief and fun. The momentum does not stop with this definition. Mischief and fun quickly translate into attitude and voice, which are essential ingredients so far as you are concerned. You are fairly certain to use USC as the venue for a novel you are toying with after the current one has had its way with you, and the only invention will be the name of the department in which the main action takes place, a name that will be influenced by your attitudes and experiences. It seems appropriate to you somehow to have the department quartered in the Doheney Library, which is real enough, and which was funded in some measure from profits realized from The 1922-23 Teapot Dome oil scandal. This fact and your awareness of it prompted you to be invited to meet with a dean at the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences to defend you thesis that all the buildings at USC are named for crooks. The Dean quite properly named at least two that are not, but you were able to counter with two more that are.

Names, attitude, and voice impart nuances the writer wishes to convey. Plots matter, story matters, but the voice behind the intent matters even more. Even were you to research a topic so thoroughly that you could be said to know it, another writer could use the same incidents from real life to convey an entirely opposite attitude and yet another writer could use them to provide a yet more apposite vision.

If location is everything, voice and attitude are trump cards.

The Three C's: Consternation, Conflict, and Compassion

The moment you give a name to a character, the closer you have come to imparting life to the character and in the process imparting concern for the character's welfare to you.  

Nevertheless, things have a way to go before you are safe; there is the reader to think about as well as the added matter of how your other characters will react to an interloper in their midst or a mere convenience character, brought in like some kick-ass consultant to set things right in the story.

We'll get you back to the reader in a while because readers are important in the long run and because they might well bring things to the table you hadn't even anticipated.  For now, we need to keep you on track--with characters and you.
Some characters are deliberately brought on stage to cause consternation to one or more of the ensemble already in place.  

This consternation might be the source of inconvenience as in an ex lover appearing on the scene or a nearly grown child, returning home on a spring break from school. wanting nothing more than a couch on which to be a potato.  Such characters are in effect armatures around which are wrapped the wires of their ability to produce discomfort and tension in every scene, as well as the aforementioned consternation.  

They might also be brought forth to enhance a conflict already in place or to push beyond the tipping point a tension into conflict.
Although these characters have a specific job description and are accordingly easy to track, we need to remember two vital qualities other than there mere name--they must be presented with some degree of compassion from you, lest their true purpose and, thus, your own motives become transparent.

Begin by imagining the climate and condition in place between the parents of this character in the process by which they selected this character's name.  Yes, I am positing that this new character has parents.

Wait a minute, are you suggesting--?

As a matter of fact, yes; I am.  This exercise has already imparted a sense of social and psychological environments, lathes shaping this character's growth and behavior, quite possibly eliciting a deeper understanding from you, if not outright compassion, relating to who this character is, what this character wants, and what this character is willing to do in order to achieve the goals you have set as a precondition to appearance in this particular story.

To add spice to the stew, you might even consider whether either or both parents wanted this character child, or if this character were an accident at first, then a growing irritant or, perhaps this accident character had come to be much appreciated to the point of becoming what we think of when we think of a spoiled child.

This exercise will provide clues for the next step in the equation--how your new, wanted or unwanted, named character gets along with the rest of the ensemble cast.  Is he or she the kind of emerging nuisance the poet Dylan Thomas became as he moved from university to university and unsuspecting home to unsuspecting home on his now legendary reading tour of America.  Does he or she throw up in the rose garden, borrow large or even minor sums of money without the slightest intention of repaying?  Does he or she come on to husbands, wives, baby sitters, professors' wives/husbands?

What kinds of nerves and wires will your new character cause to fray?  And how, oh, how will you portray this character so that the reader senses you are just as powerless to impede as your front-rank characters and their associates?