Brandon, you are noted for your fairly concise epic novels. But I am curious about how the final volume of The Wheel of Time, which was envisioned by Robert Jordan as a final and single book, got to be so long? Not just a little longer but incredibly longer (possibly over 900,000 words).
Did Robert Jordan totally miscalculate the size his final book? Or didn’t he get too far writing it and had no idea of how long it would be?
Is it including every note Jordan had on the subject because no one is sure what he really wanted to use?
Is it being turned into a self-contained trilogy because a lot of people (like me) haven’t read the entire 11 book series (or by now have forgotten the story), and it has to include some back-story?
I’ve wondered this myself, actually, in some form. As a long time reader of the series, when he began saying it would be one book, I was very curious how he’d pull it off. And then I saw the notes, and I was left scratching my head a little bit.
It’s not option three—I was doing a little bit more of this, but Harriet requested that I scale it back. Her opinion (and it was Robert Jordan’s opinion) is that the series is much too long to spend time recapping in every book. She was right, and I trimmed a lot of it.
#2 might have some influence here. Robert Jordan could have chosen to cut out characters and leave out scenes he had in the notes; it doesn’t feel right for me to do that.
But I think, overall, it’s something that you didn’t mention at all. Robert Jordan knew this was going to be a BIG book. He began promising it would be the last, but also that it would be so big that readers would need a cart to get it out of the store. I think he was planning a single, massive book at 800k words or so.
But he DID want it to be one book—partially, I suspect, because he knew his time was short. He wanted to get it done. If he hadn’t been sick, however, I don’t think he would have started calling this the last book.
Harriet has told me on several occasions that she didn’t think he would have done it in one book, if he’d been given the freedom to approach the writing how he wanted. In the end, there is SO much to do that it was going to end up like this no matter what. Unless I crammed it all in and forgot about a lot of the characters.
Would Robert Jordan have been able to do it in one book? Really? I don’t know. I think that, if he’d lived, he might have worked some magic and gotten it done in one 400 or 500k volume. But I feel the need to be very careful and not ruin this series by strangulation. It’s not going to go on forever, but it does need a little room to breathe.
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