I'm not sure if I've written about this before or not, so I'm going to write about how I come up with ideas for my characters, both main and supporting. I think this is going to be a series of posts, so stay tuned for each week to see how I came up with various characters.
My MC ideas come from a variety of places, though usually it's from something having to do with the story idea itself. Every once in a while I'll get an idea for a character without a story attached, but most of the time the two are inexorably linked.
The idea for Alana actually came from her name. Well sort of. Back before I even had the idea for Alana, I was looking through a name book (something I do quite often. I have a thing about names). While I was browsing, I came across a name that meant "from a distant place," or something along those lines. I remember seeing that and thinking that that would be an interesting story. A story about a character who got taken to a distant land and their name meant "from a distant place."
This sparked idea after idea, and I eventually wound up with the original plot line for what would become Alana's story. Now, obviously Alana doesn't mean "from a distant place" and I'm not even sure how I got to that name, since I could have sworn at the time it was the name I saw. But that doesn't matter. The key was that this name's meaning got me thinking and then suddenly I had a character and the bones of a story to go with her.
Next week I'll post about how I came up with Raelin.
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