How much of your own writing has been influenced through your reading of Robert Jordan?
Well, when I decided I wanted to be a writer—this was in my teens—I had no idea how to go about doing this. And one of the things I actually did is I broke out my Wheel of Time books and I did a reread, and I took notes on things Robert Jordan was doing, specifically with regards to viewpoints and whatnot, and I did actually make a classic mistake in doing that, in that after I finished the reread, at one point—this is kind of later and after I’d written a few books—I’m like, “Oh, I see; you juggle lots of viewpoints…” and I started with a lot of viewpoints in a book, and it just crashed and burned. I hadn’t realized that if you go back to the beginning of the Wheel of Time, it’s really only Rand for half of the first book, and then I think you get, what, Perrin? And then you really don’t have any other viewpoints, and even when you do, people are mostly together—they split off like into just two little groups, and then come back together—so, that was one thing that, you know, it actually, I’m like, “Ooh, I’m gonna do all these viewpoints like Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin!” And yeah, that’s a really hard thing to do—to do right —and you usually have to have a lot of infrastructure, but I learned—through reading Robert Jordan—I learned about viewpoint, is basically the main thing that during my early years I learned, and that’s where, you know I [later] read books that talked about it, but I didn’t know anything about this. I learned the third person limited. Like, when you jump into Aviendha’s head in the books, you see the world so differently from when you are inside Perrin’s head, and when you jump into Mat’s head, you see the world so different than when you’re in, you know, someone else’s head, like Nynaeve’s. And this ability to change the perspective based on who you’re writing is really key to having a large cast, and is actually really key to kind of the whole epic fantasy…thing—getting it right—I’ve called it in my class the ‘grand skill’ to learn if you’re writing epic fantasy, is how to tell your character’s personalities just by the way they describe a room, and I studied that from Robert Jordan in the early years.
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