Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

Heights:

Rand—6'6"
Perrin—6'2"
Mat—5'11.5"
Aviendha—5'8-5'9
Elayne—5'6"
Nynaeve—5'4"
Egwene—5'2"
Moiraine—5'0-5'2

SHIVAM BHATT

BRANDON SANDERSON

There were two plot related questions in the Q&A, both were RAFO'd: Did Aviendha's gateway in beginning of The Path of Daggers go back in time?

RAFO.

BRANDON SANDERSON

BRANDON SANDERSON

BRANDON SANDERSON

BRANDON SANDERSON

Oh, Rando, I'm really sorry about this, but Jordan overthrew your toh-toes argument.

Pratchett was talking about you having to take care in fantasy not to use words like 'sandwich', unless you had the sandwich guy appear in your story.

Jordan disagreed: the writer is simply translating... And their word for a bit of unidentifiable meat wrapped in between some...two slices of greasy bread would translate as 'sandwich.' But that's not what they call it at all, that's just what you call it in English.

Jason Denzel

Harriet McDougal Rigney

Allentrace

Other information that we gleaned from dinner included learning that Aviendha is the favorite out of the three in Rand’s “harem.” Hopefully we’ll get to see more of Pevara being awesome, but that could possibly appear in a novella on Brandon’s web page that will fill in some missing holes. But no promises! And one last interesting fact, in order to get the Illianer and Taraboner accents right, he wrote the book then went back and did a search for all the characters of those nations and then worked on their crazy accents.

The last question…Mitchell asks, can we expect an epic Rand/Elayne/Aviendha/Min reunion?

I’m so glad you said reunion.

(Small group of people erupt in laughter)

Matt Hatch

Brandon Sanderson

Harriet McDougal Rigney

RAFO. (You knew that was coming, eh?)

Though...it should be noted that prophecy says that Aviendha will have Rand's children...so, that's going to be kind of tough if they don't see one another again.

How 'bout those Yankees? [laughter]

ALAN ROMANCZUK

Alright, well there are...I believe there are four. Is that right, Maria?

MARIA SIMONS

Yeah, four. Uh-huh.

ALAN ROMANCZUK

Four. Alright, so what else do you want to know?

VIRGINIA

Wow. When are we going to find out about the quadruplets? I mean, we presume that they're working on the generation of them at some point here, but they're running out of time before the Last Battle. I mean, are these going to be born post-Tarmon Gai'don, or pre-Tarmon Gai'don, or are we just going to have to read and find out?

ALAN ROMANCZUK

Interesting question.

VIRGINIA

They are running out of time.

MARIA SIMONS

Yeah.

SPENCER POWELL

And Aviendha's somewhere in the Waste, or on her way to the Waste.

VIRGINIA

Well now she is, but she was with Rand for quite a while, so...

MARIA SIMONS

[something about Min]

ANDREW GELOS

Yeah, but she didn't have her honor, remember?

VIRGINIA

I know, but that doesn't mean that she couldn't have hooked up, uh...you know, I don't know.

MARIA SIMONS

No, Aviendha [something]

VIRGINIA

[interrupts] That's what I'm wondering; that's what I'm wondering. Have they even started yet? If they're not started yet, I don't see how they could be born before Tarmon Gai'don, unless that's the odd thing, that she does a Star Trek sort of plot and has, you know, fully-grown...

JENNIFER LIANG

[something about MTV?]

MARIA SIMONS

I'm just gonna say, read and find out.

VIRGINIA

*sigh* Well you know we will.

SPENCER POWELL

Well, then.

VIRGINIA

When you tell somebody that, does anyone ever just go, "Well that's it; I'm done. I've had it! Never reading the Wheel of Time again!" No, no…they all come back and read.

SPENCER POWELL

Yup, yup.

MARK

I tried that once. I put the book down for a sum total of about two days, and I'm like, "To hell with it; I gotta keep going!"

JENNIFER LIANG

It is a very oddly addicting series.

MARK

Yeah.

Writing Rand and Mat and Perrin and Egwene in particular was very natural to me. Aviendha was hard. I tried her early on in the process, which might have been a mistake because she thinks so differently. But I actually had to throw away two chapters of Aviendha that no one will ever see because she thinks like a Two Rivers folk, which is not the way Aviendha should think. I was disappointed in them, the first one I wrote. And anyway, I kept working on it till I got it right.

No. Nice try! That's eliminating one theory, I'll give you that one.

LOIALSON

Was Aviendha in Tel'aran'rhiod or in a mirror/portal world when she met Nakomi?

BRANDON SANDERSON

RAFO.

LOIALSON

Is Nakomi Jenn Aiel?

BRANDON SANDERSON

[laughs and grins] I should RAFO that shouldn't I?

LOIALSON

I'd appreciate it if you didn't.

BRANDON SANDERSON

[laughs] I want Nakomi....We're gonna RAFO that for now. Nakomi needs...there's gotta be a few things I don't answer. I'm so bad, I answer everything Robert Jordan put an answer [for, to?] [bunch of people laugh]. Track me down another time, after A Memory of Light is out.

Brandon again spoke of Aviendha and the Aiel, due to the way they think, mentioning how he went through several drafts and back and forths with Harriet, whilst doing multiple re-reads of Aviendha’s POVs.

Then he spoke of Mat, saying that Mat is such a complicated character, though you might not think he is at first glance. He is an unreliable narrator, with vast differences between how he thinks and how he acts, and that Jim’s Mat POV’s are some of the best in the series. He then spoke of his own writing and that because of these elements it’s easy to miss things with Mat, and that that is why his early scenes in The Gathering Storm are not as good as his scenes in Towers of Midnight, where Brandon began to ‘get him’. Brandon finished by saying he’s best in A Memory of Light.

The scene depicts Min, Aviendha, and Elayne gathered on a battlefield around what is presumably a funeral pyre for Rand al’Thor, the Dragon Reborn. What we recognize as a yin/yang appears in the clouds, possibly signifying a unity that has evaded male and female channelers for over 3000 years.

DARRELL K. SWEET

“Aviendha and Tuon are the ones I worked the hardest on, but I expected them to be hard. I wasn’t expecting Mat to be hard. That blindsided me.” Brandon explained that in general the Andoran characters are the easiest for him to write as, “They feel like friends from high school.” So it surprised Brandon when he sat down to write Mat and discovered that he didn’t have an immediate grasp on him. Brandon eventually realized it was because, unlike the other characters, “Mat is an untrustworthy narrator. He doesn’t always believe what he says and he doesn’t even always believe the thoughts in his own head. He’s a character I’ve struggled to write but I think I’ve gotten as close to him as it’s possible for me to get.” (The positive reaction to the Mat chapter he read certainly put weight to this statement.)

He also, tongue-in-cheek, admitted that before he wrote Cadsuane she was his least favorite character. “She was just too mean!”

Can you give any further detail on Min's viewing of Aviendha having Rand's babies? (Per the quotation: "Aviendha would have Rand's babies, too. Four of them at once! Something was odd about that, though. The babies would be healthy, but still something odd.")

They are natural quadruplets (no, Aviendha does not adopt Min's or Elayne's children in order to get four), and the "odd" thing is specifically their ability to channel from birth.

Was Aviendha pregnant by the end of the books?

Yes.

What makes you like Aviendha so much?

It's hard to explain. Always as a reader, I thought she was awesome. She didn't take any nonsense, and put Rand in his place when he needed it. I liked reading about her. Her viewpoint was different. When I read the Aiel, I thought they were weird, and then reading Aviendha, I saw they were just different. It was something Robert Jordan did very well.

Could you comment on the Aiel Wise woman that Aviendha met in Towers of Midnight?

I can give a comment, which is No Comment. That's one question that I am not answering because there are certain things in there that I don't think it's . . . I just don't want to answer that one, so I can't comment on that one. Sorry.

Chris Cottingham asked, Is Nakomi's dealing with the soup for Aviendha the same as Rand and the pipe?

What do you mean?

Question

Is it the same power?

Brandon Sanderson

(Laughs) No, it is not. I'll go ahead and, wow, you actually managed to get a question out of me about Nakomi. No that is not the same.

Footnote—Terez

(Brandon later said that he didn't know anything more than the fans do about the pipe.)

Question

Is "Nakomi" from the Old Tongue, and is there a translation?

Brandon Sanderson

I'll go ahead and RAFO anything else dealing with Nakomi. You did get an answer out of me on one thing, so that's good.

Harriet McDougal

Nakomi wandered in from the Song of Hiawatha.

Brandon Sanderson

There you go.

Question

That's what we thought, yes.

Other Characters

I have a fondness for Aviendha, my personal favorite of the female leads in the Wheel of Time. (My favorite among the male leads is Perrin.) I wanted to see a return of Avi in the last books, as I felt we just hadn't had enough of her lately. I also have an interesting relationship with Nynaeve, a character who I (as a young man) resented. My opinion of her is the one that grew the most during the course of my reading as just a fan, and by Knife of Dreams I absolutely loved her. I knew that with all of the crowding in the last books, she actually wouldn't have a large part to play in the Last Battle. (Very few would be able to do so, beyond Rand/Egwene/Perrin/Mat.) Therefore, it was important to me to give her a solid and interesting sequence of scenes through both The Gathering Storm and Towers of Midnight. Her raising was not instructed by the notes, but was something I was insistent be in the books. (And along those lines, one thing Harriet insisted happen—and I was all too ready to oblige—was a meeting between Rand and his father.)

To be continued.

Towers of Midnight: What did I learn?

Set Your Sights High

I've never been one to dodge a challenge. However, after failing to do The Way of Kings right in 2002, I was timid about tackling complex narratives across many, many viewpoints. Towers of Midnight marked the largest-scale book I'd ever attempted, with the most complexity of viewpoints, the greatest number of distinct and different scenes to balance, and the most ambitious forms of storytelling. Aviendha's trip through the glass pillars was the most audacious thing I believe I pitched at Team Jordan, and was one of the things about which they were the most skeptical. Perrin's balance between action and inaction risked having him descend into passiveness.

I worked on the new version of The Way of Kings during this time, in 2009–10, when I was also working on Towers of Midnight. I doubt I will ever be more busy than I was in those two years, tackling two of the biggest books of my career at the same time. However, during this time I entered a place in my writing where something clicked, dealing with the next stage of my writing career. I'd always wanted to master the complex epic—my favorite stories of all time fit this mold. Before this, however, I'd done very few sequels—and Towers of Midnight was the most complicated sequel I'm ever likely to do.

I learned a great deal about myself during this period, and the results are on the pages of these two books, Towers of Midnight and The Way of Kings.

So, a lot of people are very curious about this conversation, rightfully so. They had many interesting things to say to one another. And I didn’t put that on-screen on purpose because I think that there are . . . Number one, I feel like it was the wrong place, narrative-wise, to have a break for something like that. And it’s also one of these things that I feel is going to work better in your mind than it might have worked on the page because there are so many places that conversation could have gone, that locking it down into to one of them would not have . . . I don’t think would have fully accomplished what we needed to accomplish there.

Beyond that, the conversation that they have would be directly tied to the sequel series, which is not going to be written. And, you know, I feel that if Robert Jordan were still with us and were going to write that sequel series, that scene would have appeared. He would have had them talk, because that would be important then for character motivation, or at least would have been referenced in the sequel trilogy. But since we’re not doing the sequel trilogy, doing that makes promises, also, that you’re not going to get fulfilled as a reader. And so, leaving that off-screen, I felt, was very much the right move.

That said, a lot of people make the assumption that Artur Hawkwing would be—and I’m not sure why they make this assumption, but I do get this from people—that he would be upset, that he would quote/unquote set her straight, or things like that. I think the conversation would have gone in a very different direction. In a, “You're doing a good job. There are certain things that I would suggest to you, but you need to conquer the work. That’s what your job would be. And here’s some advice on going about it.” Rather than a setting her straight, I think personally he would be proud of her. Granted, you know, now that he has all of his memories back, and he’s no longer under the dark influence that he was under during certain parts of his recent mortal existence, he will not be the exact same person he was back then. But he still is a conqueror, and that’s part of who his make-up is. And so, just keep that in mind as you imagine that scene however you want it to go. And I am still adamant about the fact that I think he would not like Aes Sedai even without the influence upon him. They are not his . . . yeah, he would not want to be involved with them.

Amanda McTaggart

This is a follow-up to that. We have a certain tall red-headed lady who goes through a magical object that shows what the future is. Does that future take into account the conversation that would have been had between the leader and her ancestor? Or is that something outside of the overall scheme of the world, and therefore would not have been taken into account in the future that was presented in that magical object?

Brandon

So the future that was presented is—I think people are clear about the idea that this is a possible future. And that is not . . . You know, some of the things that we get as glimpses of the future in the Wheel of Time are set in stone, and some of them are not. And this is one that is not. And so that conversation could have been part of that, but could also not have been part of that.

Who wrote the scene in which Aviendha flash-forwards to the future in the glass towers? The scene was beautifully epic because of how it shows the transition of the post–Last Battle Randland, and every time I read it, I feel well and truly sad that I will never see stories set in that time.

(Having said that, what you did with the Mistborn series and the Wax/Wayne novels is a pretty good substitute for reading Fourth Age stories, so there is that. Thanks a lot!)

The glass pillars was me, as I believe some fans have already figured out. One of my big pitches to Harriet and company was that we needed to take risks and chances with these stories, because that's what RJ would have done. If we played it exactly safe, we would have a bland ending to the story.

We couldn't always take the same risks that RJ would have, but we needed to have a dynamic plot where characters, and the world, grew and became something different. They were very scared of this sequence during my pitch, but it's one that—when they read it—they were sold on it very quickly.

As for Wax and Wayne, just wait until we get the Mistborn space opera books.