Considering some of the cultures that you’ve come up with in your books, like the Seanchan, or the Aiel, even the building up of their history, are there any real world equivalents to them?
Not one-to-one. Not for any given cultures. Well, the Aiel for instance, there are bits of Berber and Bedouin cultures. Zulu. Some things from the Japanese historical cultures. From the Apache Indians. Also from the Cheyenne. I put these things together and added in some things that I also wanted to be true about the culture beyond these real cultures.
Then I began to figure out if these things were true, what else had to be true and what things could not be true. That can be very simple. If you have a culture living in a land where water is scarce, well, obviously they value water. It’s necessary for human survival. On the other hand, if they live in the middle of a waterless waste, dealing with crossing rivers or lakes is going to be difficult for them. They don’t know how.
It makes perfect sense.
Those are two very simple and obvious points, but you put together a lot of things like that and you begin to get an image of what the culture is like.
Even the way you have these characters talking about people who live with a lot of water, calling them “wetlanders” and so forth is very interesting. The concept of the “World of Dreams,” Tel’aran’rhiod —when did you dream that up?
I’m not sure of when that exactly came to me. I’m not certain if I could point to a source, because I cannot remember anything of that sort. It’s quite possible that I read about something, some myth or legend somewhere that included this, but by the time I began writing, I had the concept of Tel’aran’rhiod quite solidified, you might say.
And the concept of the Source and the True Source, the male half, the female half—when did you come up with that?
Again, I can’t point … I thought about what I was going to write for quite a long time. The first thoughts that would turn into The Wheel of Time, I had perhaps ten years before I began writing. And after the ten years, I realized I had a story.
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