So what did he leave for you? What guidance did you have?
I had a lot of guidance. Robert Jordan and I actually wrote, at our core, in very different methods. I am an outliner; I work from an outline, I feel like I need to have a goal in mind when I’m writing, and he was more what we call a gardener or a writer—that’s George R.R. Martin’s term. He nurtured stories and he grew them, so he would hop around and write on different sections as he was feeling them, and I always generally start at the beginning and go to the end, and so what was given to me was a big pile of notes that had some completely finished scenes, polished and ready to go, some that were stopped in the middle, and some that were just lines that said, “I’m thinking of doing this.” A big pile of interview questions that his assistants had asked him on his deathbed, two or three dictations he’d done in the last weeks of his life that I could listen to, and just everything that you could imagine was in there. All of his notes for himself during the course of twenty years working on this series, some three million words of notes, and two assistants, and one editor who helped me dig through all of these notes to find the answers to questions that I needed to know.
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