Do you mind if I ask a question you’ve probably been asked a bunch of times before?
I’ll happily respond, but as I’m responding I’m going to try to think of the most boring question I can ask you. Something you’ve answered a billion times, to get payback.
Heh. Fair enough.
When I first heard that someone was continuing Jordan’s Wheel of Time, my first thought was, “Wow, that’s a cool gig.” Then my second thought was, “I would not want that responsibility for all the money in the world.”
How did you come to grips with that? Those are big shoes to fill…
My thoughts were all over the place. I do legitimately love the Wheel of Time and have been reading it since I was a young man. If you look at my early unpublished books, you’ll find they were deeply influenced by the Wheel of Time. Amusingly so; looking back on it now, I see things I didn’t even notice that I had done. So that love of the series was part of what was bouncing around in my head.
I didn’t become a writer because I wanted to write in other people’s worlds. I wanted to tell my own stories, and I was making a comfortable living at my writing before this. For a lot of projects I would have said no regardless of what they offered, so it had to be about more than the money. Beyond that, there was this sense, as you expressed, of “Wow, if I screw this up, I’m in serious trouble. People will find me and burn my house down. Wheel of Time fans are hardcore.” I struggled with this, and it almost caused me to say no. One writer I know mentioned regarding this, or posted it somewhere, “This is a thankless job. Anything that Sanderson gets right will be attributed to Robert Jordan, and anything he gets wrong will condemn him.” I took all those things into consideration.
But in the end, I felt I could do a good job on this, and that it could be a sendoff I could give one of my favorite authors, someone who deeply influenced me as a writer. And I felt that if I passed on it, someone else would be found and would get to do it. The question that it came down to for me was, “Knowing that someone who is not Robert Jordan is going to do this, can you really pass and let anyone other than you do it?” And the answer was that I couldn’t let someone else do it. I had to do it. So I said yes.
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