How much of the last books were completed, or do you have an idea of the percent before you took over?
Fortunately I can fall back on Tom Doherty, who answered this question, so I don’t get in trouble. And I don’t usually—I get in trouble a little bit sometimes. [laughter] There are certain things that I have to be careful not to say, to get into spoilers and things like that, but Tom Doherty did answer this. There were about 200 pages of material that was done, and that did include lots of different things. It included completed scenes; it included dictations that he’d done while he was sick; and it included fragments of scenes, and in some places, some Q&As with Maria and Alan, where they would say “You said this about a character; can you go more in depth on that?” And then there’s like a page of him talking about that character and that scene, and those 200 pages were given to me, and I have used that as a guide in writing the books.
There were holes. There were some very big holes, which actually was exciting to me in some ways, because it allowed me to actually be part of this, rather than following a very strict “This happens, this happens, this happens.” In fact, they weren’t in order, which was also exciting to me, because I work from an outline, and Robert Jordan didn’t. Robert Jordan knew where he was going, but he would often discover what was going on as he got the characters there. They call that a ‘gardener’; it’s George R.R. Martin’s term for writing; it’s how George R.R. Martin; it’s how Robert Jordan wrote books; it’s how Stephen King writes books. There are others of us that, we are more ‘architects’; we build a structure, and then we work from that, and I was able to take all of these things and build a structure from it, and one of the gems in there was what is now the epilogue of the book you’re holding, which was finished almost in its entirety—that whole sequence, with very minor tweaks by us—and that ending is the last scene that Robert Jordan talked about many times, that he knows how the book ends; he knows how the series ends. He did write that before he passed away, and that became like my goalpost; that was the thing I had to hit, was that scene, and everything leading up to that was to make that scene work. And so, when you get there, you can read…that epilogue is all Robert Jordan. Significant chunks of the rest of the books were too, but that one, you can just use as a marker, and say “Okay, this is his ending.”
There is some clarification on the issue of the epilogue here .
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