One of the things that I like about the Wheel of Time series is the unbelievably detailed worldbuilding that…I mean, coming into that, it was already eleven books along when you picked it up? My God, what did that feel like? How did you step into those shoes?
Oh, boy. So, the story is, I was a fan of the series—I picked the first one up when I was fifteen, and that was in 1990—and I’d been reading them all along; they are part of what inspired me to become a writer. I eventually broke into publishing myself in 2005, and two years later, Robert Jordan passed away without having finished the end of this series that I’d been following all along. And, like a lot of fans, I was heartbroken. I mean, we’d [inaudible] almost twenty years of following these characters. And one day, I got a call on the phone. I had not applied for this; I didn’t know I was being considered. It was his wife. I didn’t know her, but she had read my book—she had read my book Mistborn—and she had heard that I was a fan of the series, and had looked into some of the things I’d written, and then she just said, “Would you like to finish it?”
Now, this is a major best-selling series; I’m a newbie author with a couple of books out. It was like getting hit by a freight train. And there’s all this continuity and all these characters….it was a massive undertaking. I was scared out of my wits, to be perfectly honest, but honestly, I almost said no because of that, but there was that piece of me—the fan—that said, “Look, if you say no to this, and someone else comes along, and they do a bad job, it’s going to be your fault, Brandon.” So my own conscience was like, “I gotta do this. If Robert Jordan can’t do it, they’re going to have somebody do it. I’ve gotta do it.” So I threw myself into it, and you know, the most interesting thing is, how have I done it? Well, I’ve had great resources, and part of those are fan resources. What the internet allows us to do with Wikis and things like this is, the fans have gotten together and created these detailed outlines and chronologies and all of these things, which have just been wonderful. You don’t expect that, you know, but the fans do a better job than we do, as writers, sometimes, of keeping track of all of these things, so I’ve relied on their resources.
I do think I’ve been able to do some fun things with the series, as a fan, that I’ve been wanting to do, from reading it since I was a kid, but that’s actually a weird things because, as a fan coming on, I had to be careful. You don’t always want to do what the inner fan wants you to do; otherwise it just becomes like a sequence of cameos and inside jokes. So I had to be very careful, but there are some things that I’ve been wanting to have happen, and the notes left a lot of room for me to explore. I did get to have a lot of creative involvement in it; it wasn’t just an outline, which has been awesome. You know, if it had been mostly done, they would have been able to hire like a ghostwriter to clean it up, and they didn’t have that. They needed an actual writer, and so there are lots of plots I got to construct, and as a fan, that’s awesome.
But he did write the last chapter. He wrote it before he passed away. He was very dedicated to his fans—there’s great stories—he was on his deathbed dictating, and I have those dictations where his cousin Wilson is sitting there with a tape recorder just listening to him, and I got all these things passed on to me. It was really an interesting process. I was actually handed about two hundred pages, what would become 2500. Yeah, 2500. It’s multiple volumes; it got split into three books. But, got handed two hundred pages, and in these are scenes he wrote, dictations that he did, fragments of scenes he worked on, little comments he made, Q&As with his assistants where it says, “This is what’s going to happen, this is going to happen…” I just describe it like, “Imagine there’s this beautiful Ming vase, and someone puts it in a paper bag and smashes it up, dumps out half the pieces, hands it to you, and says, ‘Alright. Build the vase exactly as it was going to be, as it was before.’ “ That’s kind of been my job on this.
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