As sort of a non-plot-related question: You’ve had a lot of opportunity to compare your writing to Robert Jordan’s after three books. What are some things that you felt that Robert Jordan did that you just can’t match, and what are some things that you feel that you do in a stronger way than Robert Jordan did?
The primary thing that I think Robert Jordan was really good at that I’m just mediocre at is prose. I’ve always tried to create very utilitarian prose, prose that gets across my idea and my story. I use what we call Orwellian prose: I try to make my prose a clear pane of glass that you see the story through. Robert Jordan was on a completely different level. He could create very engaging, beautiful prose while not distracting from the story. There are very few writers who are capable of that. Tolkien was another one, and actually, in our current era Pat Rothfuss is one of those. I envy their prose, and I think that they are just really, really good with prose, and Robert Jordan was as well.
Something that he does very well that I think I’ve learned better by working this…there are two things. I think he was very good at being subtle with his foreshadowing in a way that I think is really brilliant, and I’ve tried to learn from, and that’s something that I like to do, and so seeing how he did it has been very helpful for me. And, the juggling of lots of viewpoints is something else he did really, really well that is something that I want to be doing in my books, and that I think I’ve taken steps toward, but working on these books and seeing what he has done has improved me.
As for the other question, I’m not sure honestly if there is a right answer for this, because the primary thing that we do differently is more of a ‘different’ as opposed to a ‘better/worse’, and one of the big ones is action sequences. Robert Jordan wrote action sequences in a very specific way: he was a soldier;—he was in combat; he had been in combat before—and he wrote battle scenes…like that. I write very cinematic battle scenes. My battle sequences, I write to have a certain feel and energy, and it’s different from the complete chaos and sense of terror that are in a lot of his battle scenes where you never know what’s going on, because that’s how real war is. And I haven’t been in real war; I could try to imitate that, but instead I use my methodology for battle scenes.
If there is one strength that I have in my writing it is endings, and so coming out of this project at the end has allowed me to apply some of my skill set toward tying things up and focusing, and trying to make sure that we have really powerful endings to each of the sequences that are happening in the books.
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