Are there sheer, just logistical problems of having such a large cast that you’re really directing traffic for hundreds of characters? Do you have to keep a chart as you go along to keep track of who is where and what action is happening?
I keep incredible quantities of notes. It’s all on hard disk and on floppies, hard disks on several of my computers. But if I printed it all out, I would imagine that the notes would be equal in volume to the manuscripts for the seven books—six books that I’ve finished so far, seventh that I’m working on. It’s really an incredible amount of notes. I’m sometimes surprised at it myself. It’s broken down for each of the major characters, and for each nation and the cities. Small things, like music or food. Also, sort of, there are general categories, such as . . . one of the things that I start off with in the beginning is where is every single major character? All the major characters, all the people I’ve touched on: where are they at the beginning of this book? Even if they weren’t mentioned in the last book and aren’t going to be mentioned in this book, I still want to know where they are. And what have they been doing since we last saw them?
With such a large cast, you gain certain things. Does it cost you a little intimacy? If it was one book, focused on one person, strictly in their head, you would be a little more intimate.
No, because when I’m with the character I do get into his head, quite intimately. Or her head. In an aside, the biggest compliment I’ve had in a way was paid to me when I was autographing for the second book. At two different signings, I had a woman approach me and say that she had lost a bet, or an argument in one case, because I was a man. They’d been sure that ‘Robert Jordan’ was a pseudonym for a woman because the women characters they thought were so well written that no man could do that.
But I do get into their heads. It’s one of the reasons the books are as large as they are. There are that many layers and I cover that much territory and still get intimate, if you will, with each of the characters. Or at least each of the characters who is being a main character, or a viewpoint character at least, in that particular book.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.