Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

Thanks to Jonrox for the preliminary report and for sending me the video to transcribe. His signing table report can be found here.

Where did the idea for the zombies come from?

Are you speaking of Hinderstap? (Questioner explains further.) ...Yes you're speaking of Hinsderstap. Hinderstap came out of working with bubbles of evil and things like this, and Harriet saying to me at one point, "The book’s not creepy enough." [laughter] She said, "Go read..."—she gave me the scene with the dead rat from early—is it Eye of the World, that has that scene, where they're in the dreams, and things?—she's like, "Get me some more creepy. It's supposed to be getting worse and worse." And so I'm like, "Alright, creepy it is." And that was where it came from.

Harriet McDougal

Thus is the nature of inspiration.

the gathering storm

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bubbles of evil

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brandon on writing wot

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harriet

Alright. Oh, you were just saying hi? This is the father of my assistant Peter, and so everyone say hello to him when you see him. My assistant is very, very helpful, and this is his wonderful father.

peter

As a fan of the series, what was your initial reaction when you were first asked to write this?

Dumbfounded stupefaction. I didn't know Harriet was considering me, and when she called—and I could barely speak—in fact, I wrote her an email the next day that said basically, "Dear Harriet, I promise I'm not an idiot; I'm sorry I couldn't talk yesterday." [laughter] So yeah, just complete and utter shock.

how brandon was chosen

Do you write your own books? [laughter]

Yes, I do write my own books.

Question

Has working on another author’s writing influenced your own writing?

Brandon Sanderson

I would say yes. I...but let's just make clear, I probably would not have said yes to doing this project for anyone else. The Wheel of Time characters are like my friends from high school, that I've known them for so long—I grew up with these books, and that was a big influence in me making the decision to say yes. And I often describe working on the Wheel of Time like the equivalent of heavy lifting for weight training. It forced me to grow, or break beneath the weight. And I've learned a lot more about, for instance, Robert Jordan's subtle use of foreshadowing, his excellent use of characterization, his ability to blend a description with narrative flow.

There's just a lot of things I've learned while working on this, but probably the biggest thing I've learned is how to interweave so many viewpoints, which is not something I'd ever done successfully before. I had tried it in books that didn't get published, with that many viewpoints, and I had not been as good at weaving back and forth between.

brandon on writing

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brandon on writing wot

Are you going to do any more prequel books for the Wheel of Time?

No.

Brandon Sanderson

Easy answer.

prequels

How does it feel to finish it?

It feels sad, but satisfying.

brandon on writing wot

How old were you when you decided to become a writer?

I was sixteen. It was one year after I'd started reading the Wheel of Time, and about a year and a half after I discovered fantasy novels. Fantasy novels changed my life.

brandon on writing

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brandon on reading

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brandon on fantasy

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brandon on life

You talk a lot about [what you enjoyed about writing WoT]. What was your least favorite part of this entire project?

My least favorite part of the entire writing process is the extensive revisions that are necessary to make a book become better, and it's something I have disliked from the beginning, but I've accepted as a very necessary part of the process. If you don't revise, your book remains good and doesn't become excellent. And one day I realized that all my favorite writer friends—people I knew; all the best writers I knew among them—were people who are actually better revisers than actual writers. They could do an okay first draft, but they could really knock it out of the park with a few revisions.

And so revising has never been my favorite part of the writing process at all; I like to be discovering new things and writing new things. And part of what took me so long to get published—for those who don't know, I wrote thirteen books before I sold one; Elantris was my sixth novel—and the reason Elantris sold was because that's when I finally sat down and said, "I really do need to revise; I can't just keep telling myself, 'I'll do better on the next book.' " And I did six or seven really solid drafts of Elantris, and then it sold.

Specifically Wheel of Time: I don't know if there was a least favorite part. The most challenging part was keeping track of all the side characters; that was really tough. There were so many of them, and Robert Jordan was so good at giving them distinct voices. You know, I've got Rand and Perrin and Egwene down—I know them like I know my family—but all the Wise Ones and Aes Sedai...this can be a little bit rocky. I'd say that was definitely the most difficult part of the process.

brandon on writing

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brandon on writing wot

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characterization

I know you're user mistborn on reddit, for example. Are you planning to have an AMA in like 3-6 months?

Yes, I'll do one in the near future; I just want to wait until people have read A Memory of Light, and then I'll do a spoiler Q&A on reddit so that people can ask me things.

fandom

This is a different person's writing for you. A lot of writers discover along the way, and for you, how different was it working on this book. Where there still discoveries?

There were still discoveries, but I am more what we call an architect. This is a type of writer who builds a frame and then builds a story around that frame. I certainly do discover certain things, like...I don't know what each chapter exactly is going to be—I know what will be accomplished in that chapter, and then I sit down and then I find interesting ways to do it—but on the macroscopic scale, I almost always know exactly where I'm going when I'm writing a book, and with this, that actually worked the same way, because Robert Jordan had written many scenes and had left many instructions on what was to happen, and those became the foundation of my framework that I used to write from, and so instead of me brainstorming those, which would happen in one of my own books, I used his framework that he had given me, and I built the story around that.

brandon on writing wot

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rj's notes

Has it gotten any easier to dig through RJ’s very personalized and, in some ways, maddeningly genius organizational system?

You’d actually have to ask that of Maria and Alan since they are the ones who dig through it. I gave up on that after about two months into the first book because I couldn't make heads or tails of it; I just started asking questions of them. It still takes a long time sometimes to get responses, not because they're not working but because it's hard to find, so I don't know that it's gotten that much better.

rj's notes

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team jordan

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maria

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alan

What are some newer authors that you would recommend?

Person close to camera

A guy called Brandon Sanderson...

Um, boy let's see, how new is newer? Like, Rothfuss is not that new any more is he? Everybody's already figured out Rothfuss. Um...but I really like Daniel Abraham's work, and he's a little bit lesser known, and he's fantastic. I really like everything I've read by N.K. Jemisin. She writes these fantastic books—The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was the first one, and it's amazing. Slight content warning on that one, by the way, guys. But it was a gorgeous book, so those are books that I've enjoyed reading. I really like Mary's books, if you haven't read Mary Robinette Kowal. She is a friend, so I have to give that disclaimer, but her books are very awesome. They're like regency fantasy, so it's like Jane Austen with magic. And so I enjoy those...that's just a few.

And my current favorite living author is Terry Pratchett, which is not—yeah, he's been around for a while—but if you haven't read Terry Pratchett, you should read Terry Pratchett, but don't start at the beginning because he gets better with age. [laughter] I tried starting with the beginning in the 80s, and was like, "Oh, it was okay," and then later, seven years later, I tried another of his books, and it just blew me away. So I suggest either starting with Guards! Guards!, The Truth, or my most recent favorite, Going Postal. The end of Going Postal is awesome...[audio break]...and then Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay. Slight content warning on that one as well. Tigana is gorgeous, the best one-volume epic fantasy book I've ever read. And he's the guy who wrote The Silmarillion, so he did—what I'm doing with Robert Jordan, he did for Tolkien. He just didn't get any acknowledgement for it except for a thank you on the acknowledgements page.

brandon on reading

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brandon on fantasy

Now that the series is done, how does it feel and what are you planning to do now?

I feel very satisfied that it’s complete; very sad that it is another occasion for me to say ‘goodbye’ to Robert Jordan. The last five years have been one goodbye after another, and none of them are easy. But I knew that he wanted the series finished, and it's done, and that's very satisfying, and also very sad. So it's sad, happy, bitter, sweet—a whole mix. It goes in and out of these things.

There is still an Encyclopedia for me to do with Maria Simons and Alan Romanczuk; Maria worked with my husband, and now with me, for seventeen years, and Alan has been around for twelve, so they know the material very well and have been...I started the material that will be the Encyclopedia back with The Eye of the World, writing down proper nouns. Then it got to be The Great Hunt, and I said, "Oh Lord." [laughter] You get pages of the Aiel: who are in which sept, who are in which warrior society, who is married to whom—the whole thing. I think y'all will like it, and we will be turning it in perhaps some time next year...I mean this year. We're in '13 already. By its nature it couldn't be done until the series was complete. It may amuse you to know that in the contract it says it will be delivered in 2008. [laughter]

harriet

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encyclopedia

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maria

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alan

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aiel

How are your plans for Stormlight Two doing?

I am trying to get done for a fall, late fall release this year. Harriet snickers at me when I say that, because she knows that the chances of that actually happening are kind of slim. It could happen. It's more likely that it would be spring the following year, but I'm going to try. I'm going to try very hard. I'm about forty percent of the way through the first draft; the problem is never first draft, though; revisions take a long time on a book this big. Rothfuss once described it as, "It's like ninety percent awesome, but you don't want to release something that's only ninety percent awesome, and that last ten percent is really hard to get to sometimes." So we'll see.

Harriet McDougal

And then, production on an enormous book is also very time-consuming, and the way I think of it is, there will be Gelusil on coffee carts at Tor, or other remedies for stomach upsets. They say, "You want this book by when?"

Brandon Sanderson

Tom, who runs Tor, is optimistic, though I noticed he had little stickers—there's copies of Way of Kings to give out as prizes, and they have a sticker on it that says, "Watch for the sequel in late 2013."

brandon on writing

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stormlight archive

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harriet

Which character will you miss writing the most?

That’s an interesting question, because usually people ask me my favorite character which is easy, because it's Perrin, and always has been Perrin. But, miss writing the most? I’m actually going to say Mat, because Mat was one of the ones I struggled with to get right, and Mat for me was an evolution between Gathering Storm, Towers of Midnight, and finally this book when I feel like I finally got Mat, like I really understood him, if that makes sense. And in this one, I finally got down the mix of incorrigible silliness and complete awesomeness that is Mat. It's a really hard dichotomy to get right. And so I'm going to miss Mat because it's something I finally got good at, I feel, whereas I started good with Perrin. Perrin's always made sense to me. So there you go.

favorites

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characterization

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mat

What is your best or maybe most important memory to you through the entire process of working the books?

Well, I'll never forget when my husband handed to me the first section of The Eye of the World—it was about a third of the book—and it knocked me off my perch. And I'll tell you, I called Tom Doherty, and said, "Tom, you'll have to read this one," and he said, "Why?" [laughter] When he founded Tor, he said he wanted a company where he could always read everything that he published, and Jim said, "It's not going to be long before he said, 'I want to read all the "read" books that I publish.' " And he had been—at that point, Robert Jordan had been writing Conan the Barbarian, which were not significant record-breaking novels. They were very good, but they were what we call midlist. [?] I said because either after—I've forgotten what it was; seven years of marriage?—"Either after seven years of marriage, I have fallen into the 'wife trap' and can't tell whether it's good or not, just cause I've married Jordan—and either that, or this thing is wonderful. That's why."

And so, he did read it, and I started—he was my working [?] publish it, but he did support the book. And as it went on, he was giving it to me in [?], and at one point I said to him, "Now, when we get to Tar Valon...." He said, "We don't get there in this book." [laughter] I said, "Okay." And then, when they go to Rhuidean—that surpassed the beginning....[?]....just absolutely gorgeous, gorgeous writing. So that was high. And in one of the books—and I've honestly forgotten which one it was—I said, "Honey, this is a boring section. You've got talking heads, talking heads, talking heads. Can't something happen?" So somebody gets killed. [laughter]

Footnote

Harriet has told this story before here.

Brandon Sanderson

And you know, Tom once told me—this is the guy who founded Tor, Tom Doherty, and it was his company all through the 80s—he once told me he sold the company in order to get the capital after reading The Eye of the World, that he thought, "I need money to promote this book, to make it a best seller." And that was one of the main things, he said, that convinced him to sell the company.

Harriet McDougal

I never knew that. That's a hell of a story. Anyway, he did do a splendid job in publishing it. There used to be something called the American Booksellers' Association, and there was a huge convention in the spring. He had gone to Dallas to hand out previews to booksellers, which was common in those days, but what was not common in those days is that he had done a double, full-color cover on the book. Nobody did that—they had those gray covers, with plain type—and that startled all of them. It just really did; he just did what he does better than anybody else, and he did it with The Eye of the World. He was just a wonderful publisher all through the series.

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rj on publishing

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conan

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the eye of the world

Can you still read the books and appreciate them after The Wheel of Time being your job for so long?

You know, I still read Jim's—Robert Jordan's books—and enjoy them, and I just recently picked up one and started reading through it. I don't reread my own books usually unless it's to reacquaint myself with certain things so that I can work on a sequel, because I will simply find too many things I want to change. This is the artist's dilemma; you've got to let it be done; you can't go back and continually tweak and revise and rewrite. At some point is just has to stand as a work of art, and reading your own books again...it's too dangerous for me to do that. So I don't reread mine, so I've never reread Gathering Storm, for instance. Now, I did read it fourteen times while we were revising it [laughter], so I do know that book pretty darn well, but I haven't reread it since.

brandon on reading

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brandon on writing

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brandon on writing wot

Was there anything in the notes that surprised you?

So, I got everything at once. There are two things that stand out that are moments when I was looking through the notes and I was like, "Oh!" And then there was one that I'm like, "Oh no." [laughter]

The two that were "Oh!" were, in Gathering Storm where Egwene gets a special visitor, and colors of dresses are mentioned. [laughter] That one was kind of mind-boggling, and that's one of the things that Robert Jordan had complete. Not—I had to write into it and write out of it, but the important parts you're thinking about were done. The second scene was in another section that he had complete, and this is where, at the end of Towers of Midnight, someone you haven't seen for a long time and someone else have a romantic moment together, and that surprised me. I was not one that was expecting that—it's well-foreshadowed, but I just hadn't been expecting it. I actually went to Team Jordan, and I'm like, "This? I—What?" And they're like, "No, it's in there; here, look at this, look at this," and all the foreshadowing, and I had just completely missed it. And so, those two were the surprising moments for me.

The kind of "Oh no" moment was when...he didn't actually write the scene, he just made a sentence that said—oh, someone's plugging their ears because they don't want spoilers; I'm trying to talk around the spoilers, so—in Gathering Storm, there is a scene where a certain member of the Forsaken gets spanked [laughter], and Robert Jordan wrote, "This happens, and she gets spanked." And I'm like, "I'm not going to write a spanking scene; I've never written a spanking scene before!" [laughter] And I was kinda like, "Come on, Jim, do you really have to do this?" But I was like, it was in the notes, and there was no good reason not to [?] that scene, so I went ahead and wrote that scene.

rj's notes

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thom

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brandon on writing wot

All of the females in your books seem to be very independent, strong women; do you believe that you write them that way from your perspective, or is that your experience, or...?

There's a couple of things behind that. The first is that my mother graduated first in her class in Accounting in a year where she was the only woman in the entire Accounting department—that was in an era where that wasn't something that a lot of women did—and so I've had quite the role model in my life. But beyond that, it's kind of an interesting story. I discovered fantasy with a book I mentioned earlier, Dragonsbane. Wheel of Time was my [?], but I discovered Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly, and my teacher got me to read this, and I came back to my teacher, and said, "People write books about dragons?" She's like, "Yeah, there's a lot of books about dragons; go read them."

And so I went to the card catalogue, which we had back then in the Stone Age [laughter], and I flipped to the next title in the card catalogue, and it was Dragonflight by Anne McCaffery. And so I'm like, "Well, this has dragons; maybe this is good." And it was fantastic! If you've ever read Dragonflight, it's amazing! So I read through all of those in the school library, and I'm like, "Well, what else is there?" The next title in line was Dragon Prince by Melanie Rawn, and so I read through all of those, which are also fantastic books, and one of the best magic systems in fantasy, in Melanie Rawn's Sunrunner books.

And so I got done with those, and at that point, a friend came to me, who'd heard I discovered fantasy, and said, "Here, you'll like this book." It was by David Eddings. And I told him, "I don't think guys can write fantasy." [laughter] That was—honest to goodness—that's what I told him. I'm like, "I don't know if I want to read a guy writer; I don't think they can get it down." And so, I did end up reading Eddings, and enjoying Eddings, but my introduction to fantasy was through three women who have at times been called feminist writers—all three of them have worn that mantle—and that's still with me as part of what makes a good fantasy book, and I think that's just an influence.

My very first novel that I tried, which was not Elantris—White Sand—the female character turned out really bland, and I was really disappointed in myself, and I thought, "This is terrible." And it took me a long time to figure out—like, several books of work—what I was doing wrong. And what I was doing wrong—and I find this in a lot of new writers across the spectrum—is I was writing people—specifically "the Other"; people who are different from myself—I was putting them in their role, rather than making them a character, right? And this is an easy thing to do—like, you get into the head of your main character; they're often pretty much like you; you can write them; they're full of life; they've got lots of passions—and then, the woman is like the love interest, and the minority is the sidekick, right? Because that's....you know, how do you do that? And you stick these people in these roles, and then they only kind of march through their roles, and so while it's not insulting, the characters don't feel alive. It's like one person in a room full of cardboard cut-outs, like "Stereotypes Monthly" magazine. [laughter] And then your main character.

And women are just as bad at doing this as men, just doing the men in that way. And so it's just something, as a writer, you need to practice, is saying, "What would this character be doing if the plot hadn't gotten in their way?" Remember, they think they're the most important character in the story. They're the hero of their own story. What are their passions and desires aside from the plot? And how is this going to make them a real person? And you start asking yourselves questions like that, and suddenly the characters start to come alive, and start to not "fill the role." And you ask yourself, "Why can't they be in the role they're in?" And that makes a better character, always, than "Why should they be?"

Flop roles, too, if you find yourself falling into this, you say, "Okay, I've stuck—" You know, Robert Jordan kind of did this. The natural thing to do is to put the wise old man into the mentor—you know, the Obi Wan Kenobi, the Gandalf—role, and instead, Robert Jordan put a woman in that role, with Moiraine, and took the wise old man and made him a juggler. [laughter] And these two...you know, and suddenly by forcing these both into different roles, you've got...they're much more interesting characters. And you know, Thom is named after Merlin; he could have very easily been in that role, and instead he wasn't. And so, it made even the first Wheel of Time book so much better by making characters not be the standard stereotypical roles that you would expect for them to be in. So, there you go.

Also, stay away from tokenism. If you force yourself to put two people in from the same culture in your book, that will force you to make them more realistic as characters, because if you only put one in, you can be like, "Alright, their whole race and culture is defined by this person." And putting in multiples can help you to say, "Look, now they can't both just be defined by that." Anyway, I went off on a long diatribe about that; I'm sorry.

brandon on reading

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gender

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brandon on writing

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brandon on fantasy

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white sand

We've got time for just a couple more questions; I'm going to come back to the first group that didn't...okay. The shirt right there—the pinkish-orangish, more orange than pink—the light orange shirt.

How do you feel about the graphic novel project?

Well, it's in work, and mostly Maria Simons has been working with the Dabel Brothers, who have been a joy to work with editorially. There have been some problems about the schedule, but their devotion to the work is really just what we want to see.

Brandon Sanderson

They're famously wonderful artists, and not so good on the business front.

Harriet McDougal

And I've seen a French edition of a piece of The Eye of the World, and to see Mat talking French, and saying, "Ah, zut alors!"

Brandon Sanderson

Hey, that's a nice thing. Way in the back there, they have some of the graphic novels for sale!

Harriet McDougal

What a coincidence!

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, what a coincidence. Ooh, someone's holding them right back there, the thing back there; you can go get some of the graphic novels, you can go through those....

Harriet McDougal

Yeah, and there's one in the front here.

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maria

What’s your favorite part of the creative process?

I'm gonna say...[audio cut]...is the ending, writing the last sequences that I've been planning so long—because I always know what my ending is, and I tend to point everything at the ending—writing that last sequence is my favorite. For instance, my favorite scene to write in A Memory of Light comes right near the end. There's a very long chapter that you'll read; it's the last part of that very long chapter, into the next chapter which is very short. (something from audience) Yeah, it's 200-something pages.

Harriet McDougal

For good reason.

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, for good reasons.

brandon on writing

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brandon on writing wot

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a memory of light

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tarmon gai'don

What comes first—the magic system or the world—and do you have a specific inspiration for your magic systems?

Usually, it's a process that they're intertwined. I would...usually for a book to grow in my head and start, so I want to build that framework, it has to have a couple of good ideas for some magic, a couple of good ideas for a setting, a couple of good ideas for characters, and a couple of good ideas for a plot. And those, like I'll have those sometimes independently. I'll say, "Okay, this would make a great magic system, but I don't have a place for that yet." Or I'll say, "This is an awesome place; I eventually want to put something in that." And they'll both have grown separately, and then I'll put them together, and they become greater than the sum of their parts. And I'll say, "Ah! That works so well together. The magic system is about people who can store up their attributes in chunks of metal, and then the magic system is about people who eat metal and gain powers; those can both work in the same world." And I'll [?] those together, and things like that. So it's much more organic of a process in that case, while I'm brainstorming to build it out.

brandon on writing

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brandon on magic

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worldbuilding

Can you tell us the two sentences about the outriggers?

Well I can, but it's a spoiler. Later, I certainly will, but right now that is a spoiler, in the two sentences.

Brandon Sanderson

The question references the outriggers, which was a sequel trilogy that Robert Jordan had intended to write to the Wheel of Time, involving some of the characters. We can't say much about it. You can find out more online, because we don't want to give spoilers, but he only left two sentences telling us what was going to be in those, and so it's basically impossible to write them, even if we had wanted to.

Harriet McDougal

Well, if he hadn't expressed himself so thoroughly, that before he let other people write in his universe, he would take his hard drives and run over them with a semi three times to be sure that that didn't happen, and it's...I mean, since there was literally two sentences, it would be very much a sharecropping operation—exactly what he didn't want to have happen.

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rj's notes

I was wondering, Harriet: how many books did you edit for Jim before you found him to be romantic?

One book, but it was a big mother of a book. [laughter] It was a book called The Fallon Blood, which was his first published novel, an historical novel of Charleston during the American Revolution. [inaudible] So we cut it, and it was taking up three lines a page. I said, can't we kill some of these battles? And he said, "Harriet, I've already avoided..."—I've forgotten what it was—"...fifty of the Revolutionary battles by sending the hero off wounded to Georgia to recover. I really can't cut any more." Okay, so we did all that, worked together, and then at publication time, the book was being distributed by Ace Books, where I'd been editorial director, and the director of publicity quit in the month of publication. So I drove him down to Savannah where he had one of the famous booksignings that beginning authors run into—you go to the bookstore, and they have one of your book. [laughter] [inaudible]

And so, we had done a number of things like that, and he had befriended my son, who was then eleven. And one afternoon, he'd come in [inaudible] And Will came running up to me where I was working at my desk, and he said, "Mom, he says he wants to take me to see the Star Trek movie. Can I go?" He said, "Huh, huh? Can I go?" And I said, "Well, let me come downstairs with you," and I said, "Can I come too?" [laughter]

Footnote

Harriet also tells these stories here (for the bit about editing The Fallon Blood) and here (for the bit about her son); we had better audio for that interview, so the information is more complete.

harriet

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fallon

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editing

Alright. Now, there's a few more things we're going to do, so....no, start talking in a minute. I want to actually make a request to Harriet. Harriet, if I grab one of these books, will you read the first paragraph—just the wind paragraph, the legend thing—so that they get a little reading, among the last times that any reading will cover these paragraphs. And so, maybe just two paragraphs there, Harriet? And then we'll have some announcements.

[end video]