What’s in a Name?

I have been thinking about names a great deal over the past few years.
As a writer the subject of names comes up repeatedly.

How do you pick the name for your main character (or characters)? Or for that matter how does your villain (assuming you have one) come to have a name that is just right?

How on Earth do you name a novel?

Perhaps names are something that are easy for some people. Perhaps they are something that seem to leap out of nowhere.

Not for me.

Names are something I have struggled with. A lot.

My soon to be published book Veiled in Shadows is a perfect example. I didn’t finally pin down a name for the book until I began submitting it.
I was at a total loss.
Deb suggested a few names which didn’t grab me, I couldn’t hit on anything.

Then I read the manuscript again and the name finally came to me.
My book features a number of main characters, on both sides of the conflict in WWII.
Naturally, most of the characters believe that their side in the war is “right”. But one of the main characters is, so to speak, “caught between the lines”.

At one of the turning points in the book she describes how she sees the choices she has to make: ‘I don't know anymore. I have lived so many lies. Nothing seems black or white any longer. I live in a world veiled in shadows.’

I had my title.

Some of my characters were no easier. For a start many of them are from non English speaking backgrounds. Picking non-English names is a minefield. I wanted their names to be authentic, but they couldn’t be so unusual that readers found it hard to identify with them.

Some names were easy. Danny Parnell for example had his name chosen by me pulling Christian and surnames out of a hat.

Another, Peter, had a name as soon as I thought of him.

Yet others like, Katharina and Ebi my most central characters (and who feature in my back cover blurb) had provisional names for most of the time I was writing the book.
Ebi was “Erich” and Katharina was “Katrina”.

I knew them intimately, but it was almost as if they hadn’t yet trusted me with their names.

Oddly, I don’t remember how I eventually came up with Ebi’s name (a contraction of the name Ebert).

Katharina came to me from, of all things, a cemetery. I wasn’t happy with “Katrina”, but had just as much success picking a name for her as I had with the book. Desperate, I went to one of the best places for authentic names I could think of. A cemetery.

In the Lutheran section of a large cemetery I had a huge database of names of people born in Germany from about 1870 until 1950.

Being somewhat of a nerd and loving cemeteries I compiled a list of men’s and women’s names of people born in Germany and did some very basic statistical analysis. In this particular cemetery the most popular German male name was Heinrich and the female name – Katharina.

Katharina, a German form of Katherine was very like my provisional name, but unlike “Katrina” it seemed right.

It felt like Katharina finally trusted me enough to share her name.


While on the subject of names, at a loose end on Sunday afternoon Deb and I went on one of our usual lightning trips

This time we drove about 130 km (around 80 miles) to the North West. We ended up in Bendigo, in what was Victoria’s largest goldfield.

Like my characters and my book, Bendigo seemed ambivalent about its name for its first forty years of existence. According to Wikipedia “Although the goldfield was always known as Bendigo, the first official name was Castleton, which was quickly replaced by Sandhurst, after the British military establishment Sandhurst. The city was not officially called Bendigo until 1891”

Like Melbourne, Bendigo shows signs of the immense wealth that flowed into the town from the gold diggings.

In the main street the original Post Officeand former Crown Lands Office.A pub, The Hotel Shamrock. Something tells me there must have been an awful lot of money in beer in the gold rush days.

In the gardens on Pall Mall Queen Victoria averts her eyes, from the nudity on the Alexandra Fountain, which stands slap bang in the middle of Charing Cross (what was that about names?)
I think this fountain is a classic case of the fact that money does not necessarily mean good taste!
Within a few hundred metres of the main street is a reminder of what gave the town its wealth.
The Central Deborah Gold Mine.
A metric tonne of gold was dug from this mine, while it was operational from 1939 until 1954. The mine was bought by the town council and preserved for posterity in 1970.