How did you keep track of all the characters?
There are, what? What are we up to, like 2800 named characters in the Wheel of Time? [laughter] It’s more than two thousand; it was more than two thousand when I started, and it was like 2400 or something like that when I started, and I’ve added a few. So, how can we keep track of all of these characters? That actually is when people ask me, what the hardest part about this was, I often say that that was the hardest part. It’s not just keeping track of them, because actually keeping track of them is somewhat easy; there’s lots of fan resources, which I use. The Encyclopaedia-WoT is my favorite, though tarvalon.net runs a very nice Wiki which goes more in-depth and things. And keeping track—that’s the easy part. The harder part is, Robert Jordan gave them all voices, right? Everybody talked in their own way, and was their own person, and when, you know, Perrin is traveling with like three random Wise Ones, they’re all individual personalities, and so before I could write a scene, I had to go back and remind myself, how each of these three people…what their attitudes were, and how they spoke, that sort of thing. It was very difficult.
I don’t know if you—I mean, I tell this story; I don’t know if you guys have heard this before—but the level of detail Robert Jordan went into in the worldbuilding…there was one point where I was working on Towers of Midnight , and I sent an email to Maria saying, “I can’t keep track of who is with Perrin. Do you have just a list somewhere?” And I was really just meaning the Wise Ones, right? And, you know, named characters. Maria comes back and says, “Well I just dug this out of the notes; I hadn’t seen it before. Maybe this will help. It’s a file called ‘With Perrin’”. I went, “Oh, good.” And I opened it up…no, that’s not what it is; it is the names of all the Two Rivers folk who haven’t been named in the books yet. [laughter] …who are traveling with Perrin, and often a little bit about each of them, and a list of several dozen names of people who haven’t been named yet. That’s the level of detail we’re talking about with this, and it was a challenge; it was a challenge on all of us.
Fortunately, we did have Maria and Alan, who we should mention—Alan Romanczuk, who is also one of the assistants and very good at this sort of thing, and I would focus my writing, particularly in first draft, on just getting the emotional content of a scene down, right? Get the narrative flow down, make sure it’s working, and I would try to get all the voices of the characters right, but I wouldn’t worry as much about continuity. I would then send it to Maria, and she would send back this thing with all of these notes saying, “Oh Brandon. Oh Brandon, you can’t do this.” “Oh Brandon, you killed her.” “Oh Brandon…” You know, stuff like that. You see her shaking her head over each of these things. And then we would try and fix all of the problems caused by that, and that’s kind of how it went.
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