I had a rough outline of a little over 3,000 years of history before I started writing the Wheel of Time books, enough to make me feel like it was a real world where I could drop in casual mentions of historical events. Where I come from, if you want to say something was a long time ago you say it was ‘Before Second Manassas’—it’s a historical tag that everyone in Charleston understands. I wanted to be able to do that sort of thing with history in the world of The Wheel of Time.
The history began as a rough sketch with major points inked in. As I went along, I would sometimes look at the chart and say, “If this happened here and this happened there, something like this would probably happen here .” It begins to create a real pattern of history. The readers picked up on it, realizing that there’s more to the world than just what’s happening in the story. The first time I got a letter asking about something like that, I thought, “God, this guy must be a fruitloop! He’s talking about this as if it were real .” But then it hit me. “Wait a minute, idiot. This is what you want them to feel, isn’t it?” So I answered his question. A few times I’ve had to be fast on my feet, because I hadn’t figured out something in the history that was very minor.
DragonCon has a track that follows my books, and one of the things they asked me to do was hand out the prizes at the trivia contest. In the final round these two women were up there answering questions I probably couldn’t have answered without my notes. But they were just popping out the answers, ding ding ding. I never expected this incredible depth of study.
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