You obviously had some materials Robert Jordan left for you, and your own skills as a writer that you’re bringing to the table, but you’re also bringing those fan expectations to the table. What was the biggest challenge in keeping all this straight and just getting the work done?
Well, you know, as a writer, you train yourself to deal with distractions. Yes, this was a big project. Yes, this was a stressful project. But when I sit down to write, those sort of things flee my mind. During the actual writing period, nothing really matters except the words on the page.
Still, it was a challenge. Writing a given scene for this series would take me about twice as long as it would take me to write a scene from another story. That’s because when I would work on these books, I would need to go back and read what Robert Jordan had written for all the characters in this scene, that I had their voices in my head, that I was using them correctly, that I was fact-checking things that had happened in the past.
I did a lot more revision than when I’m usually writing, where I would usually focus on, “Let’s keep the story moving.” Instead, I would have to ask myself, “Does this character know this piece of information? Does that character know this piece of information? Have these two characters ever met?”
There were 14 books of continuity in this series when I was working on this last one, if you count the prequel. And there’s a lot of material to dig through—they’re big, thick books!—to keep track of everything I needed to know. Keeping track of the side characters was a real challenge, and filling out all of their plots.
At the end of the day, you know, the most important thing for the book was that we kept our promises—that the storytelling promises that Robert Jordan made were kept. And that’s the soul of being a good storyteller, making interesting promises to the reader, and fulfilling them in even more interesting ways.
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