Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

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.

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Brandon Sanderson

You spoke during the signing tour of perhaps having some material of Pevara being awesome on your website—is that still on the table? If it is, would it be pre- or post-Towers of Midnight?

That suggestion came about because I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to fit it in. In the end I decided to get three or four chapters of it into Towers of Midnight. So it is there. I haven’t yet decided whether the rest of that story will happen on screen in A Memory of Light or whether it will have to happen off screen. The outline is all there, but I’m still not sure what I’ll have time for and what will work with the pacing.

Posting something on my website is not something that I could just do offhandedly. If I were going to do it it would take a lot of talking to Harriet and Tor and getting permission. So that was really only a long-shot contingency plan. Will it happen? I don’t know. We’ll have to see what gets into A Memory of Light. I’m pleased with the parts I was able to fit into Towers of Midnight, which means there’s a good chance I’ll be able to fit the rest into A Memory of Light.

That, she replied back, is something one should never, never say to an Aes Sedai. Ever. (p. 700)

So, I was lucky enough to get to go to the Memory of Light signing in Lexington at Joseph-Beth on January 11th.

When I was getting some books personalized, I told him how much I really liked the characterization of Androl and Perava.

He told me that Androl was a fun character for him to write, because it was his "own" Asha'man.

When he agreed to finish WoT, as he was looking over his notes, he asked if he could create an Asha'man to do with what he wanted. Thus, Androl.

He also talked about how Perava was his idea of how the Red Ajah would make their way in the world after the taint was gone from saidin.

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Granted, they were relatively minor characters, but they had the best side story in the final three books, IMHO.

Brandon answered (paraphrasing) that distance would affect the strength of their communication.

When you were working on A Memory of Light, I know Mr. Jordan had the fates of most, if not all of the characters written down. Were there any characters where you got to decide the fate of, either in A Memory of Light or the previous two books?

Yes, there were some. For example, Pevara's fate isn't mentioned in the notes, which is why I felt all right co-opting her for the Black Tower storyline, which was mostly mine. Siuan's fate wasn't mentioned in the notes, save for the rescue of Egwene from the White Tower. Harriet made the decision on how her story was to play out.

Androl and Pevara

In working on the Black Tower plot, one thing I realized early on was that I wanted a new viewpoint character to be involved. One reason was that we didn't have anyone to really show the lives of the everyday members of the Black Tower. It felt like a hole in the viewpoint mosaic for the series. In addition, each Wheel of Time book—almost without exception—has either introduced a new viewpoint character or added a great deal of depth to a character who had only seen minimal use before. As we were drawing near to the end of the series, I didn't want to expand this very far. However, I did want to add at least one character across the three books I was doing.

I went to Team Jordan with the suggestion that I could fulfill both of these purposes by using one of the rank-and-file members of the Black Tower, preferably someone who wasn't a full Asha'man and was something of a blank slate. They suggested Androl. The notes were silent regarding him, and while he had been around, he so far hadn't had the spotlight on him. He seemed the perfect character to dig into.

A few more things got spun into this sequence. One was my desire to expand the usage of gateways in the series. For years, as an aspiring writer, I imagined how I would use gateways if writing a book that included them. I went so far as to include in the Stormlight Archive a magic system built around a similar teleportation mechanic. Being able to work on the Wheel of Time was a thrill for many reasons, but one big one was that it let me play with one of my favorite magic systems and nudge it in a few new directions. I've said that I didn't want to make a large number of new weaves, but instead find ways to use established weaves in new ways. I also liked the idea of expanding on the system for people who have a specific talent in certain areas of the One Power.

Androl became my gateway expert. Another vital key in building him came from Harriet, who mailed me a long article about a leatherworker she found in Mr. Jordan's notes. She said, "He was planning to use this somewhere, but we don't know where."

One final piece for his storyline came during my rereads of the series, where I felt that at times the fandom had been too down on the Red Ajah. True, they had some serious problems with their leadership in the books, but their purpose was noble. I feel that many readers wanted to treat them as the Wheel of Time equivalent of Slytherin—the house of no-goods, with every member a various form of nasty. Robert Jordan himself worked to counteract this, adding a great deal of depth to the Ajah by introducing Pevara. She had long been one of my favorite side characters, and I wanted her to have a strong plot in the last books. Building a relationship between her and Androl felt very natural to me, as it not only allowed me to explore the bonding process, but also let me work a small romance into the last three books—another thing that was present in most Wheel of Time books. The ways I pushed the Androl/Pevara bond was also something of an exploration and experiment. Though this was suggested by the things Robert Jordan wrote, I did have some freedom in how to adapt it. I felt that paralleling the wolf bond made sense, with (of course) its own distinctions.

Finding a place to put the Pevara/Androl sequence into the books, however, proved difficult. Towers of Midnight was the book where we suffered the biggest time crunch. That was the novel where I'd plotted to put most of the Black Tower sequence, but in the end it didn't fit—partially because we just didn't have time for me to write it. So, while I did finish some chapters to put there, the soul of the sequence got pushed off to A Memory of Light, if I managed to find time for it.

I did find time—in part because of cutting the Perrin sequence. Losing those 17,000 words left an imbalance to the pacing of the final book. It needed a plot sequence with more specific tension to balance out the more sweeping sequences early in the book where characters plan, plot, and argue. I was able to expand Androl/Pevara to fit this hole, and to show a lot of things I really wanted to show in the books.