So when you came to write [RJ’s] work, essentially, did you try to enter into his style in those respects, or did you maintain your own convictions, I guess?
It’s an excellent question, and it’s one that I wrestled with for a long time. I worried. . . Eventually, I did actually try a few things, that I was just trying to imitate him, and I worried I would just come off as parody, honestly. And that was a big worry for me. At the end of the day I decided that what I needed to do was to get the voices right for the characters. Robert Jordan writes a very intense third person limited, where each line is colored by the vision of the character he’s writing for at the moment.
And I felt that if I could get the souls of the characters right, even if I were coming in and doing it stylistically a little bit differently, the books would still feel right, if that makes any sense. And that became my goal and my quest: get the characters’ souls to feel right. I often use the metaphor, I say it’s like you’re watching a television series, and the director changes—the actors are still the same, but the director changes—and that’s what I was going for.
It’s a hard core, though, isn’t it? I mean, Wheel of Time fans are very, very hard-core…
They are.
…and (laughs) I wondered whether any of them had misgivings about you stepping in this way.
Oh, I got a great deal of email. My inbox flooded as soon as I was announced. And there was really no justification I could give. All I could say is, “Well, wait until the book comes out. Let’s see what I can do. If it stands up on its own, then that’s the best proof I can give, and nothing I can say earlier will do a better job of that. If it falls down, then no justification I give now will mean anything anyway.” And so I just focused on the writing and trying to get the book out and, you know, trying to….a real challenge was making sure that it fulfilled his vision for the series, and not mine, because I was a fan, and sometimes you can let that inner fan take over, and that can be a bad thing for a story. You want the story to have power and emotion; you don’t want it to be a big list of inside jokes.
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