The complexity of your world and your plot suggest that you must have some kind of self-created encyclopedia to which you can refer. Can you tell us about your Wheel of Time database?
Well, a little bit. There are copious notes on my computer about societies and cultures and groups. As an example, the Aes Sedai have two—the women who can wield the One Power, channel the One Power—there are two files on Aes Sedai, each of about 2MB. One is the history of Aes Sedai, the culture of Aes Sedai, the laws, the ways they run things, how they recruit, how their structure is…the internal structure of their organization. And the other is lists of individual characters—individual Aes Sedai—and all the information I might know or might need to know, or think I might need to know about these characters. I didn’t sit down and simply put this together, now. A lot of people are interested in process; they want to know how you did it. The thinking seems to be, “If I know how he did it, then I can do the same thing.” This all accreted. It built up very slowly. I made a few notes about this character, and a few notes about that character, and then eventually realized that I had far too many notes on too many different kinds of characters in this one file. It was getting unwieldy to find who I wanted when I wanted, so I split it up and took some characters out, and gave those characters individual files, and then the rest of it began to grow, and I thought, “Well, I have the files here, about these people, and I have these files over here about different nations, and that’s getting unwieldy, so I’ll split the nations up into individual nations, and I’ll move the files about the people; if they’re a citizen of that nation, I’ll move them to that file on that nation,” and it slowly accreted to where there is a huge database on this world, and a lot of different areas in this world.
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