[You said that RJ wrote the scene where Rand comes out of the mountain, but you said you based Nakomi on something “deep in the notes”. Did you add anything to the scene RJ wrote?]
[RJ wrote the woman in the scene. I had to dig deep in the notes to figure out…] …who this person is. It is something that I had to put together myself.
So you had to…you didn’t change anything about that scene.
I don’t believe that I changed anything about that scene. You will have to compare it to the original if that ever comes out in the notes—I don’t know whether that’s in the stuff that was released to the [library]—but I don’t believe any changes were made except for perhaps proofreading and editing changes as we went through. The big changes I made to the epilogue were the addition of certain viewpoints, but were not changes to what was written. Some of these scenes we have in the epilogue were some of the cleanest scenes that we got. And sure, we had to clean them up in some ways, but I don’t believe that scene had any major edits to it, but it’s now been quite a long time since I worked on that scene, so take that with a caveat.
But that was one of those scenes, when I read it…now, you’ll have to remember, it was 2007 when I went to Harriet’s house and I got handed this stack of paper, and I sat down and I read it, and I started with that scene. That was the first thing that I read, because that was the completed—like, I wanted to read the ending, right? There was stuff written before that, but […] the ending to me that I read started right with what you’re talking about, that exact moment with him stumbling out, and the things that he’s kind of mumbling, and the things that he’s hearing and saying and stuff. But, you may have to—I honestly, it’s so hard for me, some of these things, it’s so hard for me to remember because we’re going back seven years, where I started working on that outline, right after reading what he’d written—and started building it, and over the years, we get a lot of questions, was this you? was this him? I’ve forgotten. [laughter] Because…no, you have this whole thing and you’re working on it for seven years, and what was him and what was me stopped really being that important when we’re building the story. Granted, there are certain things we really wanted to preserve of his because we wanted the actual writing he completed, but you know, which themes, and which concepts—there are things where I’m like, “Oh!—I was looking back through my outline, and I’m like, “Oh, I put this in. Why did I put that in? Oh, it’s because of this,” and then I went back into his notes, “No wait, no he said to do that!” And he wrote that! And they blended together quite a bit. Like, that scene, over the years, I thought, “Oh, I added some stuff to that scene.” And then I went back to the original when I was going to put it in, and lo and behold, I hadn’t added anything to that scene, is my recollection. It was there, and I’m like, “Oh wait, no that was him, and that’s what sparked me to do this other thing,” which then, we turned into this other scene, and…but it gets really hard for me to parse without having, in front of me, to say, “Okay, did I change any words?” So…
What can you tell us about that woman?
That right there is one of the two main things which I have said I’m not going to say anything about. So I’m not answering…that’s…that’s one of the big…I feel that the notes indicated that this should be a mystery that he wanted to be left, and…things that…there are actually very few of those that we haven’t said anything about, and I think this is the one that I’m just not gonna talk about. The other one of course is the pipe, and that’s because we don’t know. That…the woman you’re talking about, I do know things about, but I’m just not…that’s…you know, this is the mystery that he wanted us to have, and the pipe is another one. Those are the two big things I can’t give you answers on, one because I won’t, and one because…um, because I can’t. The other thing I haven’t been answering is I haven’t been answering who made the decision on every specific character, who should live and who should die, and I don’t think that focusing on that is really productive, and so I haven’t been telling people who, except for one character [looks at Harriet; audience laughs] that I didn’t want to die [awws], that Harriet decided needed to go, of the four-hoofed persuasion. [laughter] In general I just don’t talk a lot about those, so I’ll just give you a warning, those are things I’m not going to answer. I am pretty free about a lot of other things, but I don’t answer those.
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