Hello. This question is in relation to Wheel of Time. How did you find taking over from another author and keep it consistent? Obviously there’d probably be some force of having to conform to a previous author’s writing style, so that it keeps some sort of consistency, but how do you still own that work and keep it true to yourself?
Right. You’re asking the hardest question that I think I had to ask myself when I took on this project. How do I make sure….I didn’t want the Wheel of Time to become about Brandon. At the same time I had to trust my storyteller instincts, which is the only way I knew how to tell the story, and it was a really difficult process to work out, and I kind of turned it into a give and take. There are certain things that I learned from Robert Jordan that I do very similar to him that I could then do in his style very well. There are other things that were unique to him that I just couldn’t in any way mimic.
For instance, his action sequences come from a life spent partially as a soldier, and serving in Vietnam, actually being in firefights; that lends a certain type of narrative to a fight sequence. I haven’t done any of that. I’ve just watched a bunch of kung fu films. If you read my action sequences, you’re not going to feel like Robert Jordan’s because there was no way to imitate him, and I felt that if I tried, I would just be parodying him, and so it was really a give and take. In some places I really tried hard to emulate what he would have done in his style, and in other places I have to say, there’s just no way for me to do that; I have to approach it my way, and I took that on a case-by-case basis.
All in all, my main goal, which I’ve succeeded at in some places, and failed at in others, but my main goal was to make the characters feel like themselves, and that was my focus. Can I do this? I’ve said it before: no one can replace Robert Jordan. No one can get it a hundred percent right but him. I think I’ve been doing a fairly good job, but there are certainly mistakes I’ve made in trying to get those characters’ souls to be the right souls, and that was my main goal, is to try and get that right.
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