As you finish this amazing saga, did you ever wrestle with the fact between your voice in the writing versus Robert Jordan’s voice in the writing?
Did I ever wrestle between the voices? It was less of a wrestle and more of a process, but yes. I’ve spoken before about how I looked at the project and looked at the early notes, reread the series, and deciding if I was going to imitate Robert Jordan’s voice or not. And I’ve talked about what I ended up doing, which I decided I would not try to imitate Robert Jordan’s voice but I would adapt my voice to the Wheel of Time, which I felt would match better. And so, that worked almost universally. There are a few places that it didn’t work as well as others that I then had to work on longer. It was not really a struggle. I mean, but because of what I decided to do, it was more of a “I am working to adapt my voice to make it appropriate to the Wheel of Time.” And you will be able to notice words, it’s going to be…it should be very easy if you actually sit down and break it down and say, “Oh here’s a word that Brandon used that Robert Jordan never used.” I try to actually remove as many of those as possible during the copy edit and editing stage. I don’t worry about that at the beginning but then we’ll say okay, if this is a word that’s never appeared in the Wheel of Time before, then that’s an appropriate word to just swap out and change. But at the same time you’ll notice things. You’ll notice things that I do that Jim didn’t do. You’ll notice my use of contractions is different from Jim’s use of contractions. And that’s just something that is going to be obvious if you look at it, but hopefully by matching the style of the Wheel of Time, not Robert Jordan, as soon as you’re into it a few pages, the distinctions hopefully will fade. And that’s what I was shooting for, because my goal was to make the characters sound like themselves. So I wouldn’t say it was a struggle, though there were some places where it was harder than others.
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