Once upon a time, I edited an article on a certain very large website that provides answers to questions people ask a lot, and one of the articles was called 50 Ways to Kill A Squishy Invulnerable Assassin Creature …
Right. [laughter]
And, you know, there were many lists, and most of them were sort of facetious; some of them were, you know, less so, and I was just kinda wondering, when we did actually kill the Squishy Invulnerable Assassin Creature in, I think it was the second-to-last book…..
Yes, mmhmm…
…where did the inspiration for that come from? Was it maybe from that site? Because there one there that… [laughter]
I will say that I am, with a lot of things in fandom, I am…was familiar with that list, and I did, after I had built the outline, go to the list and say, “How did they suggest doing these?” It had been a long time, but I was familiar with the list.
Alright.
And so I can’t say that I said, “Oh, I should do it this way.” But I can say that this thing and some of these, like a lot of the Asmodean theories—which, by the way, I didn’t have to choose on [laughter]—but, things like this were in the back of my brain. It’s part of being part of fandom.
Yeah.
Like, I’m not the only one that theorized about gateways, right? Fandom had been theorizing about gateways forever; it’s one of the things that drew me to fandom, is when I come on…I had been dreaming about what to do with this, and I’m like, “Ooh, here’s other people who are magic system people like me!” and this is a magic system thing, right? How do you kill this thing. And so, this… So, yes, I was familiar with them, but I can’t pinpoint and say, “This is something that inspired me.”
Okay.
Um, but it definitely was in the back of my brain. The entire FAQ is something I had read, at various points in its development, and so, yeah. It’s hard to say what of the FAQ, over the years, seeped in there and got in my brain, and, you know, it’s only things like the…some of the really tough stuff to talk about with the Wheel of Time is, when you start reading a series when you’re 15, and you read it multiple times, certain things get cemented into your head that aren’t actually part of the books, and some of them are, but they’re your own weird interpretation, and…
It’s called fanon vs canon.
Yeah, yeah. And when you…being brought on as the writer, I tried to become aware of these, and say, “Okay, what are my own biases?” But I couldn’t separate them all. Working on one of the books, I remember this scene—I’ve told you guys this story before—where I wrote this whole scene, happening with the bridges going into Tar Valon, and Maria’s like, “They can’t see. This is like a mile-long bridge.” And I’m like, “A mile-long bridge!? Not in my Tar Valon!” [laughter] I imagined it perfectly! And nope, going back there, these enormous bridges that I had not imagined, even though they’re pivotal to Tar Valon. I have a good friend who insists to this day that Thom Merrilin does not have a mustache. That’s pivotal to the character, right? But each of us are going to have these things…when we are reading, our initial impression of the character becomes canon in our own head, and shaking us from that is very difficult sometimes to do. And so, bringing the legacy of all of this with me to writing the books means that you sometimes end up with me being unable to trace where an idea came from. Is it, when I was reading and I was 17 saying, “Oh, I wish this will happen.” Is that the origin of the scene, you know, when we bring Tam and Rand back together? Is that the origin of that? I mean, how long had I been thinking about that? Is the origin of that when that meeting with Harriet in April where she said “I have one big request, and it is that you find a way for Tam and Rand to meet again early in one of these books.” Was that…? You know. How much of it was that, how much of it was my own fan desire, how much of it was….you know, it’s so hard to trace these things and break them down, but I suspect it’s a bit of everything.
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