Advanced Search

Allura Williams

I love the symmetrical Alethi names like Shallan and Navani. How do you come up with such good names.

Brandon Sanderson

It is part instinct, part design. And trying things out and seeing how people respond to them and changing it if they just don't feel right over time. I like having a linguistic quirk, such as symmetry or repeated consonant sounds. Those sort of things are very fun for me. I like real world inspirations. Famously, Silence came from looking at names of actual... Puritans, came from an actual Puritan name that I ran across in sort of a family history context, and I'm like. "Ooh, someone named their child Silence? That I've gotta use." Real world inspirations are fun. Ran across another one of those, you may see pop up if I do some more Threnody things. I ran across a person whose name was Thomas Thomas and I just love the name Thomas Thomas.

Brandon Sanderson

For the Shards of Adonalsium, which are basically the deities of the cosmere, I have picked things like Odium, Ruin, and Preservation, to be words that are really easy to... they mean something, you understand exactly what they are, there's going to be sixteen of them, so trying to remember all sixteen different names if they weren't something like that is going to be really hard. It makes it easier to keep which is which, it has an ominous feel to them, and they regionalize, translate into other languages really easily. So that's what I've done.