You bestow such vivid, unusual names — Cormoran Strike, Leonora Quine, Lula Landry, Daniel Chard, “Digger” Malley — on your characters. What is the process you go through when you’re trying to decide what to call someone? How, for example, did you come up with Cormoran Strike’s name?
J.K. Rowling/Robert Galbraith: I wanted Strike to have an odd name because his dead mother was a flamboyant, unconventional character who had only herself to please when it came to christening him. She returned to her family in Cornwall to give birth and I thought it would be like her to fix on a Cornish name, a quixotic and almost paradoxical choice given how much she wanted to escape her backwater roots. If she’d waited a week or so he might have been Elvis, but I think she was feeling momentarily sentimental about home.

Cormoran was the name of a giant who reputedly lived on St. Michael’s Mount. I liked it for many reasons: partly because the character is a big and somewhat ungainly man, partly because it’s the sort of name people would constantly get wrong, which fed into Strike’s constant, dogged battle in life to be his own person and free himself from the burden of his infamous parents. As for Strike, that happened quite fortuitously. I wanted a one syllable name because Cormoran is quite long enough and looking through an old book about Cornish customs I noticed that a contributor had the surname Strike. It isn’t a Cornish name, but that was exactly what I wanted, because he doesn’t really belong anywhere.

I’m very interested in the power of names and naming and I can’t really get to grips with characters until I’ve settled on their name. This is the first time I’ve given a lead character a really strange moniker.

The fact that Strike also has so many nicknames is revealing of him as a person. A lot of people think they’re close to him, but how many people would he describe as close friends? He makes friends easily, but he’s essentially solitary and self-contained.

Some mystery writers are plotters; they outline, they plan, they know exactly where their stories are going. Others are known as “pantsers” (as in writing by the seats of their pants — sitting down every day and just going where the story takes them). Are you a plotter or a pantser?
Rowling/Galbraith: I’m definitely a planner. “Lethal White” required a spreadsheet that was more complicated than any I’ve created before. It had nine columns, red text for red herrings, blue text for clues, and various colors for different suspects and themes. Before I start each Strike book, I know exactly who did it, why they did it and how they did it.

When I hear pantsers describing the way they work I feel a mixture of admiration and anxiety. I did an event with Stephen King and John Irving a few years back and Stephen described his process as following a thread to see where it leads. When it came to John’s turn, he said he always knew damn well where the thread led before he started following it. I’m somewhere between the two. The initial inspiration may be one simple idea with no start or finish, but I never start writing a book unless I know exactly where I’m heading.