Hey Brandon, long time reader and avid fan. When I found out you were taking over The Wheel of Time, I waited until you’d finished it and then read it straight through for the first time ever. I started in May 2013 and finished in December 2014 - and I absolutely loved it. I especially appreciated that you maintained the “character” of the characters. I laughed at Mat’s quips as easily in A Memory of Light as in any of the earlier books, and honestly, you may have injected a bit more humor than Jordan was capable of. I seem to remember laughing a lot (and tearing up) through the first Mistborn as well.
How do you manage the personalities of all of your characters? And how do you go about creating and “enlivening” these characters whose personalities are necessarily so very different from your own?
Keep doing great work! <3
Thanks! I do think I finally started to get Mat right in AMOL.
I manage character personalities with a careful mix of notes, instinct, and free writes in their voice. For the WoT, many of the characters were easy, as I’d been reading about them since I was a young man. They were like my high school buddies. They WERE different from my own, but in part because I created my characters as reactions against these characters–I didn’t want to do what RJ had already done.
A lot of what I do with character, however, is very instinctive. It is the one big part of my writing process that is difficult to explain, as I often go with my gut.
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