As I was reading A Memory of Light there were many times where I was fairly overcome with emotion—which is not too common of a reading experience with me. To use a WOT phrase—laughter and tears. Sometimes I just had to set the book aside for few minutes to let the motion calm down. I’m not novelist, but through this blog and my day job I do write a fair amount. I’ve experienced that sense of pride, that sense of emotional overload that happens when the writing feels right, when my emotions for what I’m are writing cross over onto the pages themselves. I imagine that as you’ve written the final three WOT books you’ve experienced similar feelings. That you sometimes sit down to dinner with your family after writing and are overcome with your love for them as a result of what you had just written. That you have that urge to hug, love and be comforted as events from you’re writing stick with you. Assuming you can relate to this, please share a moment or two.
Boy, that’s a hard one, because those are going to be personal moments. You describe it quite well, but it’s the sort of thing that happens with writing any series. The most personal moments for me honestly happened when I read the ending years ago. For me, the series has been finished already for all of that time. It has been an emotional experience, and I’m certain it will continue to be one.
You also have to remember that writing this was very draining, and that has kind of the opposite emotional effect. But I’m not a terribly emotional person. I’m not sure I can come up with anything specific other than that night sitting and reading the ending that Robert Jordan had written.
This is spoilery, but there’s also the moment when I wrote Egwene’s death scene—that was probably the most emotional scene I wrote. I finished it, and then it was like a “wow, so that just happened” sort of moment. I don’t know if I can describe it in the same way.
For you, reading the book, these moments are going to come like unexpected smacks to the face. For me, I spent five months working on the outline for this book specifically, after I had spent months outlining the other two books. So I knew what was coming, and that makes it a different experience.
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