You were simultaneously writing/polishing Towers of Midnight and The Way of Kings , putting in 14 hour days. How were you able to keep Towers of Midnight distinct and faithful to Jordan without blending in your original work?
I have gotten very good at this over the years. For instance, during many years I would be working on something like one of the Mistborn books alongside one of the Alcatraz books. If you read those two, the tones are extremely different. One of the ways I keep things separate is that I generally only write new material for one project at a time. I can edit and revise one project, by taking what it needs to be and making it better, at the same time as I write new material for another project. One of the things you should keep in mind is that when I’m writing Wheel of Time books, the struggle is always—even if I’m not working on something else at the same time—to make sure that I’m remaining true to Robert Jordan’s vision of the characters rather than interpreting them myself. Which means that when it comes time to write a scene from a character’s viewpoint, before I write anything that day I generally read a chapter of Robert Jordan’s work from that character’s viewpoint, and I try to ingrain that in my head and get a resonance going, so that when I sit down to write I can keep the character’s voice straight.
Your question is a little bit like asking an artist, “How can you paint an impressionist painting one day, and then switch to realism the next day?” Well, they’re slightly different arts. Each expresses a painting in its own unique way, and it’s just what you do as an artist. It’s the same difficulty a writer has jumping between characters in a single book. How do I write Shallan in The Way of Kings and then jump and write Kaladin, and keep them from sounding like one another? It’s something you have to learn to do as a writer. Otherwise, your character voices will all blend together.
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