Hi Brandon. I hope you’re enjoying your stay here in Australia. Thanks for coming out.
I am! No dropbears yet. [laughter] Look up and live.
We’re all really happy that you’re answering a lot of these questions, cause obviously [unintelligible] answers, but can you answer one question that a lot of us have been arguing over, because we obviously started reading the books a couple of decades ago. The very first book. Was it ever going to be a standalone book, or did he always have this epic story in the background that he had a chance to run with because there’s a lot of guys my age that are arguing over this and it would be great if you could answer the question for us.
I can actually put this one to rest, because I have it from as close to the source as we can get right now which is Tom Doherty and Harriet. Tom Doherty is the CEO of Tor. Harriet is Robert Jordan’s wife and editor. She discovered him and then married him; she was one of the great editors in the business. She edited Ender’s Game —that was another of her books, a little book you may have heard of—so yeah, she did Ender’s Game and Wheel of Time, the two biggest books for the publisher, The Eye of the World and Ender’s Game were both her books, so this is a pretty stellar woman. So, I asked Tom Doherty about this, and Tom said, Okay, I can tell you the story of what happened. Robert Jordan had been doing the Conan books, and he’d been doing some of his own historical books, and he came in to Tom Doherty with a proposal for the Wheel of Time. Harriet actually stayed outside because by that time they were romantically involved—I’m not sure if they were married yet [ they were ], but they were involved—and she was the editor; normally the editor is the person with whom you make these negotiations, but she recused herself from the process; she was a little bit biased.
And so Robert Jordan went in to the head of the company himself rather than going to the editor with his proposal. And Tor has a very homey feel—Tom Doherty is like our grandfather; he’s the one that okays everything, and he’s just this wonderful guy, so you can go in and just talk to the president of the company. So Jim goes in—Jim, by the way…James Rigney…everyone called him Jim, so that’s how I’ve started to refer to him; I didn’t actually know him, but that’s how everyone talks about him so I’ve fallen into that—Jim goes in to talk to him, and Tom says, he looks at me and says, Okay, Jim has this proposal. He says “Tom, I want to do epic fantasy.” And he’s like, “Alright, alright. Well what’s it about?” He’s like, “I’ve got this great story. It starts with this young man who has the destiny of the world unloaded upon him. It’s this young man who finds out he has to save the world, and he’s probably going to die doing it.” And the book starts in the Two Rivers, he talks about it, and then the book continues on, and then there’s this Great Hunt, and then the book ends with him taking the sword that is not really a sword from a stone that is not really a stone, and that’s the end of the first book. That was what Robert Jordan pitched as the first book of the Wheel of Time to Tom Doherty from his own mouth.
Tom looked at him and said, “That sounds like a really big story,” because he went on and told him a lot of the other stuff, and he said, “That sounds huge. Why don’t we…” And Jim said, “This is a trilogy; this is an epic fantasy trilogy.” And Tom said, “Why don’t I sign you as six books.” And Jim looked at him and said, “No, no, no…I won’t need six books.” [laughter] “This is a trilogy; I can tell it in three.” And Tom by then knew Jim really well, and knew he kind of tended to expand things, and said, “Let’s do six books anyway, and if you don’t end up needing all six books, then we can do some other series for the other three, but it feels like a big series; I want you to have the room to grow.” When Tom told me this, he looked me in the eyes, and he said, “Brandon, I thought I was so smart. I thought I was signing for the whole series for sure by giving him double the length that he said he needed, and now we’re at fourteen novels.”
So, the original pitch was for a trilogy with the first book being what became the first three books. And that’s all I know of it, but that was the original pitch. And he was already involved, as I understand it, deeply in writing that first book when he made the pitch. It wouldn’t be years later till they released the book.
RJ claimed that he originally intended the story to be one book, but by the time he pitched it to Doherty, he signed a six-book contract.
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