One of the things I’ve always noticed about The Wheel of Time is how central family and parenting is to its narrative. As a writer, a parent, and someone who’s grown up with these books, what do you make of their familial aspect?
I really like it. There’s a tendency in [genre] fiction to ignore the boundaries of family. Telling a story, often, especially young-adult stories, want to take everyone away from their families, and to pretend they don’t have families, so they can go on this adventure and not be constrained by family ties. It’s this idea of escapism. Part of the realism for me in The Wheel of Time is that that doesn’t happen to the characters. You follow different characters’ parents and siblings, and it stretches across so many different types of lives and different social statuses, different cultures and countries that it feels very real, and it also feels very personal. Rand has a father. Granted, he’s an adopted father, but Rand has a father and his relationship with his father is extremely important to him throughout the entire series. Even though we haven’t seen Tam for a while, he doesn’t just vanish as a character. Robert Jordan is very good about weaving people back in, and Tam goes and hangs out with Perrin and is working with him. There’s a sense that they are real people because of their family relationships.
Having a son now myself, it makes me want to tell stories where you deal with family, because that’s such a big part of all of our lives. It feels now awkward and strange to me that so many stories ignore this. It’s become a cliché: the parents are either killed off at the end or at the beginning, or you go away and we don’t bother about them or talk about them because they’re boring, and the adventure is cool. That’s not life.
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