Alright, I finished the book…
Okay, no spoilers about the book itself, please.
There are characters we’ve been with for twenty years or so who don’t survive this book. How do you choose when characters meet perhaps an untimely end in a book? [laughter]
For this book in specific, there are characters that Robert Jordan left notes on requiring what would happen to certain characters; he was actually fairly detailed. There are a couple of cases where we made decisions on our own, and in any case, when a character dies in a book, I am trying to do what is best for that character and for the emotional beats of the storytelling. I don’t look at it as killing off characters; I look at it as letting characters take risks, the risks that they would demand of me that they be allowed to take, and if those risks don’t occasionally come with consequences, then there is no story to me, because there is no tension, and there is no possibility for things to go wrong, and without that possibility, I wouldn’t be able to write the books. I would be unable to write novels if the characters were unable to have actual danger from the actions that they’re taking.
And so, I make these decisions based on what the character demands and what the story demands. It’s never easy. I don’t sit there gleefully, as I do imagine certain writers doing [laughter], who will remain unnamed [laughter], saying, “What two don’t they expect me to kill, and how can I do it in a really, really brutal way?” [laughter] And that’s a certain skill that certain authors have; that’s not how I approach it. It’s what the story demands of me, is how I approach it, and in some cases what Robert Jordan demanded of me. I agree with everyone that he killed, though. [laughter] I felt that it was right for the story.
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