Question: about Talmanes’ character and sense of humor and how Brandon has written him.
But that’s how I was reading him, and perhaps other people read him differently. And my particular biases on the character were manifest. Does that make sense? That’s how I’ve always seen him.
But, one thing that I have to warn Wheel of Time readers… In me you get some interesting things writing the Wheel of Time book. What you get, which I hope is an advantage is someone who has read the books through multiple times, who’s read The Eye of the World nine times, who is a very deep, big fan of the series. But what you’re also getting hand-in-hand with that is someone who starting reading the Wheel of Time when he was fourteen…and on occasion has used his line edit privileges not for good.
Like, there are certain things that are embedded in my imagination that I have not realized until working on these books that I was wrong all along, one of which you may notice in The Gathering Storm was the length of the bridges into Tar Valon. Which, I had a conception of them, and I didn’t look it up because I’m like, ‘oh, I know what that looks like,’ and so I started describing it and nobody called me on it, and then it comes out and fans are like, ‘these are like a mile long, you can’t really see the other side, you know, in the way you described it.’ And I looked at it and then I read the Big White Book, I’m like, “Holy crap, these bridges are a mile long!” That’s enormous! That’s not how I imagined it at all. But that’s how it is if you look at the maps.
These are some of these things where if I even had an inkling that it would be wrong, I would have questioned it. And in other cases, you’ll get things like Talmanes, where I have always been reading him a certain way. And in my head, I’m like, this guy is way…you know, Mat’s just not noticing the smirk that this man has in his eyes. That’s how I’ve always read him, and so when I write him that comes out. Is that how Robert Jordan intended it? Well, I’ll leave you to decide whether he had the line, ‘he actually has a smirk inside,’ or if it’s just all along me reading him this way that makes me write him that way.
But does that give you some examples of understanding? This is one of the things, the issues we kind of slightly have to deal with me writing the Wheel of Time books is, you know, you can get some advantages. Mat, and Rand, and Perrin, and Egwene…these are my high school friends. I feel like I know these better than I know most of the friends I know in my life right now because I’ve known these people longer. Really, I mean, you know. You get that, and so hopefully their voices are very close to what Robert Jordan was writing them as, but you also get the preconceptions.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.