Mat’s voice really changed from The Gathering Storm to Towers of Midnight . In The Gathering Storm he seemed almost a parody of himself, while in Towers of Midnight he eased back on his roguish nature and felt much more real. Why do you think Mat came across that way in The Gathering Storm , and were you specifically motivated to correct it in Towers of Midnight or did that happen naturally?
One of the big dangers in doing what I’m doing is turning the characters into parodies of themselves, exactly as you stated. This is kind of the ‘uncanny valley’ of working in someone else’s world. If you get them close, but still wrong, it can feel worse than if you’d been more off.
Jason from Dragonmount, in the early reads, was the first one to warn me that Mat was “off.” I was surprised, as I felt I’d gotten him down. However, in going back to Mr. Jordan’s writing and delving into it, I realized I’d missed large parts of what made Mat into Mat—the tension between what he says and does, the constant little quips in narrative (which tend to be more clever than the actual things he says out loud), the complaining that isn’t really complaining. I didn’t understand Mat. I tried so hard to make him funny, I wrote the HIM out of him. (I feel Peter Jackson did some of this with Gimli in the Lord of the Rings films.)
So I’d say I was specifically motivated rather than it happening naturally. I should mention, however, that the sequences RJ worked on for Mat all ended up in Towers of Midnight and A Memory of Light , not in The Gathering Storm . Some of what you are noticing isn’t me, but the master himself.
Thanks for the reply!
I can appreciate the difficulty of trying to write someone else’s characters! For what its worth, Mat was the only one who gave off the uncanny valley feeling. Given the number of characters Mr. Jordan created I’d think that was quite a bit of an accomplishment.
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