Can you talk a little bit about the “River of Souls” sequence?
Yeah, I can totally talk about this. So, “River of Souls” is about a specific character, and in the drafting process this is not something I actually pitched to Harriet early on, but in the later meetings I got together with them and pitched something which was a deviation from things Robert Jordan had said. Harriet told me from the get-go, Look you’ve got the notes, you’ve got the outline, you’ve got to be a writer, not a transcriber. Robert Jordan would not have kept this the way it is, that’s not how we work, and in a lot of places he said I’m thinking of doing this, OR this, and you’ll have to decide which of those to do, or to do a third.
And so I pitched one of these kind of audacious sequences to her; sometimes these work, sometimes they don’t. It’s the sort of thing you need to do to create fiction, that I feel is daring, and you need to take these chances. But a lot of times you don’t know if it’s going to work until the book is done, and you can look at it together. And this was taking place in a region of the Wheel of Time world that Robert Jordan said I really don’t think we’re ever going to visit. Which is the part that was deviated, by doing this sequence. And it’s not that long, only about 7,000 words, so it’s like a novelette. I sent it to Harriet, and she said “I really like this, but we’re going to cut it”. The reason being, that it broke up the flow of the novel, and it was introducing too many new elements at the beginning of the volume that was supposed to be wrapping up elements. And those who do storytelling know that can be a really dangerous thing to do.
That was the reason. It was a big additional segment, and this is not what you call a slim volume anyway. So as a reader, it was not fun. Not that there was anything wrong with the sequence, but it was not what my antennae said we needed. We needed to get on with it.
Yes, instead of going sideways, when we needed to go forward.
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