Given how RJ went to great length in an attempt to synchronize his plotlines before the finale, don’t you feel that you had…
…an obligation not to destabilize the chronology the way you ended up doing? With all due respect, I think time has shown…
…that it was a massive mistake structuring The Gathering Storm / Towers of Midnight the way you did. Which is a shame, since your WoT-writing is GOOD.
I’m afraid I don’t follow you. The plotlines weren’t synchronized in previous WoT books .
I realize there may be disagreement, and am not offended by it. But I maintain that the structure of The Gathering Storm / Towers of Midnight is the right one.
I only had two choices with The Gathering Storm . Have a book more like Crossroads of Twilight with lots of slices of all characters, but without complete arcs for any…
Or do what I did, and make a Rand/Egwene book and a Mat/Perrin book with some time jumping.
Of course, this wouldn’t have been a problem if it would have been possible to do a single, 600k word volume.
No, but the books showed that RJ was trying to synchronize the plotlines for the finale—sometimes at the reader’s expense.
This, combined with RJ’s statements that the finale would need to be one book, suggests to me that he had a very strong wish…
…to tell the final part of the story in a more traditional chronological manner. Of course, this couldn’t be published in…
…one volume, but the story still could’ve been told the way RJ wanted it to be told. The story just loses so much due to…
…this division. Take Rand and Perrin’s scene at Dragonmount, for example. I feel these scenes were MEANT to be told in parallel.
…as opposed to one year and 500 pages apart.
I believe that a slow The Gathering Storm and fast-paced Towers of Midnight would’ve been by far the best choice from a literary point of view.
This would also lead to fewer continuity errors and better coherence in terms of both themes and action.
The biggest mistake, for me, was the insistence on publishing before you had the full overview, i.e. before you had written…
…the whole part of the story that needed to be divided. The result is a structural mess far worse than Crossroads of Twilight . No offense.:)
What annoys me is that you write WoT so well that this could’ve been a spectacular ending if told the way I feel RJ wanted.
I would very much like to hear what you think about this. I’m disappointed at the way this was done, but mean no offense.
No offense taken. You have some points. For the Hardcore breaking the book mid-story may have been better.
However, the average WoT fan would have found those books a much less rewarding experience.
In a perfect world, we could have delayed another year and just released them one after another, two months apart.
Then I could have cut the books as you suggest. That wasn’t viable, however, because of the constraints placed upon me.
One of those constraints is that The Gathering Storm HAD to be a homerun. It had to be extremely powerful, not slow.
It had been years since a WoT book, and with a new writer working on it…well, we just couldn’t have a slow half-book.
I agree with having complete arcs in The Gathering Storm but why interweave chapters in Towers of Midnight ? Why not catch up first? (interested, not cross)
I tried to do so, but the book was feeling ‘off’ by sticking Perrin’s narrative all at the front. Beyond that, chapter one had to be Rand.
Why did Rand have to be in chapter one? To me, knowing he was alright pretty much killed the suspension of the other characters’ threads.
Hard to explain. It was simply the place that scene had to go.
Both novels gave us closure for some plots, instead of The Gathering Storm giving us none. For what it’s worth, I think you did great.
Thanks. I didn’t think it was that hard to follow. The only potential problem is Tam.
Tam was the biggest problem for the more casual fans, but the hard core fans tended to have a bigger problem with the separation between Rand’s and Perrin’s points of view at Dragonmount. But you had something similar with several groups experiencing the cleansing of saidin , in one way or another, in Crossroads of Twilight .
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