Setting out to complete The Wheel of Time following Robert Jordan’s death had to be a daunting endeavor for you. Which facet of this undertaking did you believe would be quite difficult and in the end turned out to be easier than you had envisioned? By the same token, which aspect of finishing the series turned out to be a lot harder than you ever believed it would be?
I thought it would be much harder to get the characters’ voices down. That was the part I worried about, and if you read my early interviews, I talk a lot about that. And surprisingly, it was not nearly as difficult as I thought. There are certainly a few characters I struggled with more than others. But in this book, Towers of Midnight , I think our character voices are spot-on. That actually comes from Jason from Dragonmount’s interpretation of it—he said that he believes it’s really just on. And that makes me feel good.
What has been harder has been keeping track of everyone. I thought I was steeped in Wheel of Time lore before I started these books. No, I wasn’t. When people on tour asked me questions I realized how ignorant I am, despite having written and studied as much as I have. I know a lot—it’s like I’ve got a Master’s degree in the Wheel of Time, but there are people out there with postdoc experience who are completely showing me up at every step of the way. Keeping track of everything is a real challenge. I’ve described before the way I approach this. Essentially, when I get ready to write a scene from a character’s viewpoint, I dump everything into my head that I need, and I try to write all of those scenes in the book for that character while maintaining all of that knowledge. Then I dump it out and get everything ready for another character. That’s the only way I can do it, because there’s just so much to hold on to.
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