You’ve said a number of times that you had envisioned the final scene in The Wheel of Time saga even before you started.
The scene was part of what made me realize the book. I had thought of how to open it, and then how to end the story. So from there it was a matter of figuring out how the people in the first scene become the people in the last scene, because they are quite different.
It seems like a tremendous job to keep herding the characters towards that scene. Some people’s characters have a mind of their own.
My characters do what I want. When it comes to my writing I’m an Old Testament God with my fist in the middle of my characters’ lives. They do what I want them to do. The difficulty has been that the story turned out to be larger than I thought it was, quite simply. I thought I could put x amount of the story in the first book and I couldn’t. Then when I started The Eye of the World I thought I’d be able to put more of the story in it…and I couldn’t. It simple was a matter of size. These are fairly large books, seven hundred pages in hardback. It would simply make the books too large for anyone to carry without a shoulder strap.
So it’s not that the plot weaves in other directions than you expected, but that it’s richer than you realized.
Yes, exactly.
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