When you’re…you know, speaking with regards to all three books that you wrote, if there’s an issue where you think a character or a plot should go one way, and Harriet or any of the others thinks it should go another way, how does that work?
Harriet wins. Harriet always wins. Usually what happens is that there’ll be…if Harriet says something, we just do it. The only time when there’s questioning is when I disagree with Maria or Alan, and we both kind of make our arguments. We do these in-line edits with track changes in Microsoft Word; we’ll have whole conversations there, where I’ll say “This is why I think this character would do what they’re doing,” and Maria would come in and say, “This is why I think you’re wrong and they wouldn’t do this,” and we’ll have big discussions, and Harriet’ll make the call, and then I’ll do it as Harriet says, ‘cause Harriet knows the characters better than anyone.
And so there are times when I’ve been overruled—it happens on every book—and there are times where Harriet said, “No, I think Brandon’s right,” and Maria and Alan—her superfans—disagree, but the way that fandom works, we all disagree on things. You’ll find this, and I disagree with some people on how character interpretations will happen, and things like that. Some people, for instance, don’t think my Talmanes is true to Jim’s Talmanes. Things like that. That’s the sort of thing we’re arguing over. It’s very rarely over main characters, but it’s like, “Is Talmanes acting like Talmanes would?” And I read the character one way, and some people read the character another way, and I just have to go with my interpretation, and if Harriet says, “No, this isn’t right,” I revise it. If Harriet says, “No, this feels right to me,” then we just go with it.
Was there ever a case where you and Maria and Alan had a difference of opinion and Harriet had a completely different take?
That all four of us had a different take? Yeah, that’s happened; that’s very rare but it has happened. We’re trying to piece together something that’s…there’s always this consideration of “What would Jim do?” But there’s also a consideration of Brandon as author, not knowing what Jim would do, what does Brandon think needs to happen narratively? And there are some things where I, reading the books as an author, say “This is where he was going.” “No, he didn’t say it in the notes.” “No, it’s nowhere in there; he doesn’t make mention of it.” “This is where he was going; my understanding of story structure, plotting and things, and I can say, you know, as sure as I can say anything, that this is what he was going to do.” And, you know, sometimes Maria and Alan, they look at the notes and say, “No, that’s not at all what he was going to do; look what the notes say.” And I say, “No, that’s not what they’re saying,” and we have arguments about that too.
There’s lots of discussing going on. We’re all very passionate about the Wheel of Time. It’d be like getting Jenn and Jason from Dragonmount and Matt from Theoryland together and hashing out what they think about where Demandred is, or something like that. There are gonna be lots of passionate discussions. I think, at the end of the day, that makes the book better, and the fact that we have kind of…Harriet tends to just…if she has a feeling, she lets us argue about it, and then she says, like…you know, ‘cause she’s the one that would sit at dinner and discuss the characters with Jim. None of us did that, and she did that for twenty years, so…yeah.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.