I just ran a Google search on one of my character's names, Matthew Reilly, and it turns out there is a pretty successful author with the same name. He even goes by the same nickname that my character is referenced as several times. All the same, however, I had never heard of this author before, and I feel like the name is fairly generic. What do you all think? Is it likely I will run into a problem with this? Or does the name strike you as so common that there isn't likely to be a problem?
As long as your character doesn't have exact traits and distinctions that would allude to this author, I can't see how this could possibly matter. It's an overly popular first name (I have three in my family alone that I know of) and a slightly less popular last name. Maybe do a slight bit of research to make sure that you aren't creating someone too much like the author, but I doubt it should matter whatsoever.
Oh man, well I just visited the author's website, and I think it's safe to say my MR bears no resemblance whatsoever to him. Yay.
You know, this reminds me of a sci-fi project I started once. After playing around a bit with a name randomzier, I decided to name my main character "Marlin Santiago", mainly because I thought it seemed like a cool name for my badass space-adventurer. I didn't realize it at the time, but as it turns out, this guy named Ernest Hemingway once wrote a rather famous story called The Old Man and the Sea, which is about... a marlin and a man named Santiago. Imagine my surprise! I'd made a clever homage to Hemingway entirely by coincidence.
