For Brandon, you’ve had the opportunity now to write two books completely and then some. And at first, initially I know that a lot of the emphasis was on you trying to get the voices right, mimic the voice of Mat and Nynaeve and everyone else. Now that you’ve had some time with these characters and progressed them through a lot of their major turning points, do you see yourself suddenly having to direct their new motives and direct their new voices? In other words, how much of the Nynaeve and the Mat and the Rand in A Memory of Light is coming from you rather than what we had left off at the end of Knife of Dreams ?
That’s a very writerly question. This is from a writer himself. [Brandon asks if question needs repeating.] Jason’s just wondering, since the characters have now changed through Gathering Storm and Towers of Midnight , when I’m now writing them, how much do I rely on who they were in the previous books and how much do I rely on who they are now? This is actually a very good question, probably a better question than most of you know. It comes at it from a writer’s perspective, because this is something I consciously have had to think about. Because as I was writing Gathering Storm and Towers of Midnight , characters need a character progression. And I actually had to make the decision early on, if I’m actually going to progress these characters, they’re going to have to evolve from being what they were. And that was scary to me, because who they were are who Robert Jordan meant them to be, and yet he would have evolved them. And if we didn’t evolve them and they remained static, then it would’ve felt wrong. It would have been safer, but it would have felt wrong. The books would not have been slam dunks because Robert Jordan had them on arcs and they would have suddenly flatlined. And as a writer when I was working, I realized that this was going to have to happen.
And I’m not even sure if I can answer how I’m approaching it because it’s such a complex swirl of things in my head. Part of it is, a person will change but their voice doesn’t change dramatically. Their voice remains the same but their maturity and their experiences change, and so maybe how they react to something may change, but who they are at their core doesn’t. I can still read the previous Wheel of Times and get their voice in mind, but I now have to incorporate for some of them major changes and moments that have happened in their lives. Fortunately, I have a large base of material to work from, and these characters have been in different emotional states at different times. It’s like you can build . . . they’re on a gradual swing of an arc, but everybody’s more like this because that’s how characters are. You’re up one moment, down the next, up, down, and hopefully you’re going on this nice character arc where you’ve got basic overarching growth. But, at the same time, you’re going to be dipping sometimes, and regressing sometimes, and sometimes you’re going to be on highs. And so I can look at the characters at their highs to see what has now become the baseline, so to speak, and I can look at them as sometimes who they were for the troughs. Everybody is in a lot of different places a lot of different times. That’s part of it. But part of it is I really feel that I know the soul of these characters now. Growing up reading them, then working on them as a writer. . . I’ve said this before, I am much more of a gardener when it comes to character. I don’t plan my characters nearly as much because I don’t know who a character is till I write through their eyes, till I write through their viewpoint and see through their eyes and see who they are, and at that point I can’t describe to people, I just know them. It’s an instinctive thing. For me with a plot, I can construct a plot and tell you exactly how I’m constructing a plot, and how I’m building in climaxes, and how I’m building in foreshadowing, and all of this stuff. I can talk about worldbuilding. But when it comes to characters, it’s that glimmer, that glowing piece that is their soul, that I can’t describe but I just know when I see it. And that’s what I rely upon.
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