Let’s talk about the Wheel of Time series. Does it appeal both to men and women the same?
It does. My English publisher commissioned a survey, and the managing director took us to dinner and said to me at the table, “We’ve discovered that your readership is perfectly spherical.” I said, “What are you telling me? They’re fat? What are you saying?”
He said that apparently in England, my readership is evenly distributed according to age level. Evenly distributed according to income level. Evenly distributed according to educational level, according to political party, according to area of the country they live in. Every single category it was even distribution. He said we could not find a significant statistical bump anywhere.
Now, there’s no such survey for the United States. All I have is the fan mail and the people who show up at the signings. But I have 12 year old kids and I have people in their 80s. I have gangbangers and cops. I get letters from convicts. I have college students and doctors and housewives. I had teenage girls telling me things like, “You are sooo cool.” I mean, good Lord, I felt like a rock star. I found that Sir Edmond Hillary is a fan of my books. I found that a high official in the Russian government hands my books out, telling people that they are not a manual of politics but a manual of the poetry of politics. There is no typical Robert Jordan reader.
Can you explain that? I don’t think I’ve ever talked to another author who’s told me that.
No. No, I can’t. I try to write about people who seem like real people. When I need to make somebody do something in the stories, they do it for reasons that that person would do it, not simply because it’s part of the story. I work very hard, when I am writing from a woman’s point of view, to make that character seem like a woman, not like a woman written by a man.
I was very pleased, years ago, when I was on tour for The Dragon Reborn , and Robert Jordan was not Robert Jordan, so to speak. He was just another fantasy writer out there, not somebody who made the New York Times (best seller lists) or anything like that. I had women come up to me then and say, “Until they saw me, they had thought Robert Jordan was the pen name of a woman, because said they didn’t believe any man could write women that well.” So I thought, “All right! Damn. I did it, I did it right.”
I try to make the people distinct in who they are, and as I said, “I work very hard on the women in particular, and I think that makes all of the characters real, or seem real.” Now, that may turn out to be not at all the reason that people like the books, but it’s the only reason I can think of. Except I think do think I tell a pretty good story.
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