As you say, there are hundreds of characters; it’s an intricately detailed fantasy world. How hard was it to immerse yourself in that when you came to write them, to get a handle on these characters and what’s going on around them?
Yeah, that was probably the most difficult part of this. I’ve read the Wheel Of Time since I was a kid, I started reading when I was 15, so I was very familiar with a lot of things in the book—I thought I was extremely familiar—but then I started working on it and realized that there’s a depth to this that, in just reading it, I hadn’t seen. I’ve read the book multiple times, I was a fan, but there are literally thousands of characters in these books. I think there are over 2,000 named characters. As a reader, you grab hold of the ones that you like, and if some come on stage that you’re not so interested in, they pass and it’s okay, you don’t have to fixate on them very much. As the writer I have to learn all of these different voices. All the different interactions and passions and narratives, and goals and motives of all these different characters. There are a great number that I didn’t have to do that with because they’re small, they’re named but don’t influence the plot. But there are dozens of them that do influence the plot, that I had to learn. The difficult part is when I sit down to write a scene, when I write my own books I can just simply write it and do no wrong. But for these I have to do a lot of research for every scene, going back in the books and saying okay, this minor character, how do they talk? What is the voice? What do they want? All these things, it can be very demanding.
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