The Wheel turns, and the Wheel of Time series has come to an end with your completed final draft of A Memory of Light , due out from Tor Books on January 8, 2013. It must have been exciting yet daunting to be chosen to finish such an acclaimed series. How has the experience affected you as an author and as a fan?
It’s been a very interesting experience, both as a writer and as a fan. Picking up something that you’ve loved for many, many years as a fan and then becoming the writer on it really changes your perspective on the entire process. Suddenly I had to dig into it in a way I didn’t as a fan. I’m not one of those fans who always have all their favorite lines memorized or anything like that. I never had to keep track of all the subplots and minor characters, and suddenly I not only have to keep track of them, I have to know them intrinsically, which is quite the challenge.
It’s been five years that I’ve been working on these books, and it has forced me to do a lot of heavy lifting as a writer. Things that I wasn’t as good at doing, I needed to become better at doing. It’s kind of like suddenly being thrown into a swimming pool and told, “All right, now start swimming. You know how to tread water, but now we need you to swim ten miles.” It’s forced me to grow a lot as a writer. It’s really given me a deeper respect for Robert Jordan and his works, seeing the process and how much goes on in creating these novels.
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