Leigh Butler’s spoiler-free comments on A Memory of Light
It was very interesting to read this while trying to figure out what scenes she was referring to…
I know you’re incredibly busy on Stormlight 2, but if you have a few minutes, I would love to hear how you approached the notes that RJ left behind. I’ve heard the story about the ending and who killed Asmodean when you first visited Harriet’s house, but where did you go from there? I assume you didn’t just read all of the notes straight through…
Well, okay, this is going to be kind of long.
To understand my next step, you have to understand what we mean by “Notes.” There are really three groups of these.
1) Robert Jordan’s Worldbuilding Notes. These were in a series of dozens, maybe hundreds of files embedded chaotically inside of files inside of files, using his own system of notation. The notes reach all the way back to early books he was working on, as he was working on them. They aren’t intended to be read by anyone other than him, and are sometimes very difficult to figure out. This is the group that Harriet has said, in her estimation, include a total wordcount equal to or greater to that of the published series.
2) The notes for the last book, gathered by his assistants Maria and Alan, with Harriet’s help. These are far more focused on the last book, notes that RJ wrote specifically focusing on the last book. This is a much more manageable amount, maybe fifty or a hundred pages. It includes interviews that Alan and Maria did with RJ before he died, asking him what was to happen to certain characters.
3) Scenes for the last book, either in written form or dictated during his last months. This includes some completed scenes. (The last sequence in the book, for example. Also a lot of prologue material, including the scene with the farmer in The Gathering Storm , the Borderlander Tower scene in Towers of Midnight , and the Isam prologue scene from A Memory of Light .) A lot of these are fragments of scenes, a paragraph here and there, or a page of material that he expected to be expanded to a full chapter. This is different from #2 to me in that these are direct scene constructions, rather than “notes” explaining what was to happen.
Together, #2 and #3 are about 200 pages. That is what I read the night I visited Harriet, and that is what I used to construct my outline.
I took all of the items, but particularly the things in 2&3, and then I re-read the series start to finish, taking notes on character motivations, plots that had not been resolved, and foreshadowing. I used this to create a skeleton, using character touchstones from the notes (like Egwene’s climactic moments in The Gathering Storm ) to construct plot cycles.
Where there were big holes, I used my instincts as a writer and my re-read to develop what the story needed. From there, I started writing in viewpoint clusters. I would take character who were in the same area, and write their story for a chunk of time straight through. Then I would go back and do the same for another group of characters.
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