Since you are now one book removed from Jordan’s original composition, are you finding yourself having to be more original, since it is likely that you have less Jordan prepared material to work with?
Actually, the balance is rather similar, because of the way I developed the books. Half of the prologue scenes that Robert Jordan worked on ended up in The Gathering Storm ; half ended up in Towers of Midnight . I’d say a third of the other material he worked on ended up in The Gathering Storm , and a third ended up in Towers of Midnight . In both cases I’ve had one character’s plotline at the core of the book that was very well plotted out and worked on by Robert Jordan, and one plotline that to a greater extent I’ve had to add to of myself. That’s been the same in both books.
Working on A Memory of Light is going to be a different experience, because the greater amount of what Robert Jordan worked on is weighted toward the end of the book rather than all along one character viewpoint. But there will still be a lot of it there, and in that case I’m writing toward it. You have to remember that the way I write these books often is to take a viewpoint cluster, a group of characters, and write them through from the beginning of the book to the end of the book. Which means that I’ve already, even in The Gathering Storm , had to work on viewpoint lines for which there was less from Robert Jordan to use. So it’s been the same experience—it’s really divided by plotlines.
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