I read somewhere that The Wheel of Time series has been described as Tolkien-esque …was this intentional?
In the beginning, I wanted a little bit—at the beginning of The Eye of the World , I wanted a little bit of a Tolkien-esque feel. For perhaps the first 100 pages, I wanted to have that feel simply to establish that this is the foundation. Tolkien began so much of modern fantasy. Not all of it comes from him certainly, but The Lord of the Rings is this huge mountain casting a shadow over everything. Then, having said this is what you expect and this is the familiar ground, now, kiddies, we’re going someplace else.
You’d better believe it. I was expecting a certain thing in The Eye of the World , and then you started showing the way people use magic, something Tolkien never did. You blew our minds with even Rand destroying cities….Do you see these things in your head? Do you envision them?
I do. I assume everybody has a large visual component of their thoughts, where you visualize a scene or how things are working out. Our thoughts are not like reading a page. We don’t see words in our heads to describe a scene. We see the scene and describe what we’re seeing.
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