So, you already spoke to how daunting taking over the Wheel of Time is, and what an extensive series it is. One of the most impressive and interesting things to me in it is there’s more than, I believe, 1700 named characters.
So, you already spoke to how daunting taking over the Wheel of Time is, and what an extensive series it is. One of the most impressive and interesting things to me in it is there’s more than, I believe, 1700 named characters.
There’s 2500.
It’s crazy.
What is a fantasy author—since you can’t just look in the phone book or something to grab a name—how do you find your inspiration for names for characters?
It really depends on the book I’m writing. For some of my books, I use interesting linguistic quirks that interest me. I’ve taken a number of linguistics classes, and so for instance, for Warbreaker I used just something simple like repeating consonant sounds, so we ended up with Vivenna and Susebron, to give a theme to some of the name. In Way of Kings , symmetry is holy, and so I use palindromes or one-letter-off palindromes as names, and that’s where a lot of names came from in there.
For Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan actually did look in the phonebook. The reason for this being is he wanted to harken to our world with the Wheel of Time, implying the Wheel of Time is perhaps our world in the future or in the past. And so he wanted names that felt like names of people you knew, but changed a little bit. And this is where things like “Thom” came from, spelled with an “H”, or Mat, with you know, and all of this stuff.
And so he would go through the phonebook looking for common names and tweak them. And so for Wheel of Time naming, I got lists of names. I just had fans’ names, and I just used these names and tweaked them, in order to try and get the same style and feel of naming.
One trick—if you’re having trouble with this—that a lot of writers use, is they will pick a geographic area in our world, and they will base the names off of those geographic names. Like they’ll say . . . I’ve used actually ancient Persian. I’m like, ancient Persian names, sure. And then I’ll go and look at those and I will change them to fit my characters. But that way, everyone from the same region has a similar naming paradigm. So, there’s all sorts of things that you can do.
Thank you. That was the most informative explanation of naming I’ve heard.
Yeah.
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