I knew from the beginning how the story of ‘The Wheel of Time’ started, and I knew the last scene of the last book, I knew major scenes along the way, and I knew how I wanted my major characters to end up. But I underestimated the time it would take me to write the story, or overestimated how densely I could write. In the beginning I really thought I could do it in four or five books. By the end of the third I knew there wasn’t a chance of finishing the story in six books, which led to confusion among fans. ‘Oh you promised it would be finished in six!’ They would like to have completion, and so would I.
On the computer are about two megabytes of notes on individual Aes Sedai, another two megabytes or so notes about Aes Sedai organization, the structure, the laws, the customs, their sexual relations. But the story itself is all up here in my head.
A lot of people are as fascinated with the individual characters as they are with the story. They talk to me about the characters as if they are people they know. I’ve tried to make them seem like real people—they’re not perfect, they lie to one another sometimes, they try to put the best face on things even with friends. I’ve tried to make the world seem a place solid enough for people to visualize, not just a backdrop for the characters.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.