With regards to the end of the Wheel of Time, when you started to receive all of the notes and information around what actually happened, did you look at that information and see where the story and say, “Yes! Absolutely this is the best possible ending for the Wheel of Time”? Or, as a fan, did you see possible alternate endings or ways you would have liked things to proceed differently, and if so, did that influence how you’ve written?
Excellent question. I read the ending—Robert Jordan wrote it himself, the last chapter, and I have put that into the last book unchanged—I read it and I was deeply satisfied with it. That is the word I always use: satisfying. It was a satisfying ending. And I didn’t read that and ever think, “No, we’re going to change this.” I don’t think it ever needed it. What I did is I said, “That’s my goal. That’s my target. I have to get us there in a satisfying way to match this ending.” And my goal all along is to live up to that ending. The nice thing is, being a creative person, there were certain holes. There were things that he, you know….I know where that last chapter is, but there are big gaps along the way, some places where I got to say…I get to do some things I’ve been looking forward to doing, looking forward to having happen in the Wheel of Time, and that was really a treat to be able to sit down with that outline and say, wow, there’s a place here for the thing I’ve been waiting as a long time as a fan, he doesn’t say either way. I can make it happen.
And so I got to do a lot of those sequences, and then there are a lot of ones he left instructions on as well, and so my goal has been to…always my default is, if Robert Jordan said it, don’t change it. However, that said, you can’t do a book like this without being willing to be flexible in your outline. I never wanted…never changed that ending and I never have, but there are things along the way, particularly when he would say, I’m thinking of doing this, or maybe this other thing that’s opposite, and sometimes I’ll choose between one of those two, and sometimes it’s neither one and it has to be a third thing. In a creative process, you really have to be willing to do that; you always have to be willing to toss aside what you were planning to do when something better works for what you’re building, so and that has been that process. And after the books are out, I hope to be able to be much more forthcoming about what those things were and show some of the notes, if Harriet will let me, and show how they were adapted. I’m not sure if she will let me. It’s really her call. Her argument has been that she doesn’t want people’s last memory of Robert Jordan to be his unfinished things, which is a really solid argument, and so hopefully she’ll let us see some of it, but I can talk more freely about this after the last book’s out.
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