Hi, good afternoon. You mentioned before that you really like the big epics, big fantasy epics, and I actually can sort of feel that in the way you tell your stories. I was just wondering, did that help or hinder when you were taking on somebody else’s epic, as in Wheel of Time.
I would hope that it helped. I assume that it helped, having loved big epics all along. You know, there’s this thing that happens to you when you fall in love with a series like the Wheel of Time. I think a lot of George R.R. Martin fans are going through it right now, which is where you have to make this decision….it happened for me actually right between books five and six on the Wheel of Time, where you make the decision, well, I have to be along with this for the long haul, and stop being frustrated about when books come out and things like that—because, you know, we all kind of go through that—and finally decide, I’m just going to read this wherever it takes me, because I love it so much. I love he’s doing; I’m going to stop being frustrated, and I think that switchover in my head really helped me with the Wheel of Time books, because I stopped being, you know…people complained at like book ten, and things like that, and I wasn’t there; I was just enjoying what I got, because I’d already made that switchover; I wasn’t waiting so much for the ending as just enjoying the ride, and I think that helped me to kind of appreciate it for what it is, and falling in love with the big epic like that.
The other thing that’s helping me loving things like the Wheel of Time is I think that those of us of my generation who got to read things like the Wheel of Time, and got to read Game of Thrones while it’s coming out—A Song of Ice and Fire—are able to see what the masters of the genre are doing with the grand epics, and hopefully build upon what they have done, learn from them. I know Robert Jordan said several times that he feels there are mistakes he made in writing the Wheel of Time in the way he did; I think he actually, after the fact—um, James [Luckman], you can tell me if I’m wrong on this. Didn’t he say he would have done book ten differently if he’d had to do it over again? [Luckers nods.] There are things to learn from what Robert Jordan has done. They have paved the way. Robert Jordan was really the first one to tell a grand epic on this scale, ever, in fantasy, and so being able to read that really I think helps you as a writer yourself to say, “Wow,” you know, “someone has plowed through the snow, and so I can follow along behind and hopefully not make some of the wrong turns.”
Technically, RJ said that the structure of Crossroads of Twilight is the only thing he would change in the way he wrote WoT.
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