How Do I Come up with Names—Brandon Sanderson

[Music] hey welcome to the sander fact one of the most common questions i get asked is how i come up with names specifically fantastical names for books and this is kind of a difficult one to talk about because there are so many different ways it's almost like every book i write i have a different process but there are a few general ideas i've used over time one of them is kind of an old standby in designing fantasy names early in my career what i did is i would get a book an atlas and in this atlas i would go to a region of a country that spoke a language i didn't speak and i'd look at the names and i'd be like trying to take all these these different place names and notice themes and notice sounds that are used a lot and i would try to design names that would fit that region of that country and i would basically align that region of that country with a part of a map in my book you can see this in mistborn right i'm using french sounding names for the central dominance that's where you get names like demo and vin then actually just being a word in french uh it's a little more obvious at least to me in ellen's section um where he comes from because ellen and stroff i use trying to use germanic sounds and i accidentally believe both of those words are words in german i wasn't intending them to be i was just looking for good germanic sounding names and things like that and this can be handy because you can kind of have that have a theme for a group of names in a region they'll feel like they come from the same place even though none of them are probably actual names from our world um there are other ways of doing this and it depends on how much you want to get into the world building and the linguistics of your world another thing that i often do is i build a sort of linguistic theme that isn't based on any real world theme but something interesting to do with the themes of the places involved in the fantasy world so for example um in war breaker i use repeated consonant sounds to indicate uh that someone is uh is from to tell her or the places around it right and even to tell her you can see it ravina um these sorts of words i don't do it with all of them but this is why the names are things like cecebron and whatnot um in the stormlight archive symmetry is holy and so i play with the idea of names that are palindromes or nearly palindromes quite a bit i will usually also combine these with a few linguistic routes from a region uh and in the stormlight archive for instance i spent a lot more time on the linguistics than i did in mistborn so in mistborn it's kind of surface level everyone speaks the same language so i just wanted the names to have a slightly different feel and in stormlight archive i've built out some of the languages not full conlings but you know i've built out themes the the ancient singer language is based a bit on arabic right with maybe some hebrew influences as well and so this idea that these themes come out uh in the linguistics and of course you know i have this strange thing going on with the horn eaters where that's half hyaw half hawaiian a half russian um and borrowing a little bit from each of those and so it's just um a lot of times i am looking for names that sound right and then building themes around them other times i know basically a feel i want the linguistics to have like the palindromes and stormlight archive and i just start brainstorming names that would work in there and building linguistics out from that so really i don't think there's a wrong way to do this i think that uh you can maybe even go a little too far so the fact that if you do this you never actually start writing your book you're spending all your time coming up with names um mostly i will just use the name and if it feels right after i've used it for a few chapters i'll stick with it if it doesn't i'll just change it and try a new one you

Channel: Brandon Sanderson

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Length: 4min 15sec (255 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021