Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

Thanks to Marie Curie for providing the audio and for looking over my transcript.

[introduction of Maria]...about continuity, and now she's grimacing, because she's like, "Don't ask me those." But she has been wonderful, and you guys are very lucky to have her. And of course Harriet, who had worked with and discovered Robert Jordan, and then married him [laughter]. Which I always feel is a very good way to make sure your editorial direction gets taken. [laughter] And of course myself, so...we're just going to take hands, and I will probably start taking questions by region, so that that way I'll be forced to pay attention to people in the balconies, so we'll start with people in the seats. If you've got a question, raise your hand, and we'll do a few questions there, and then we'll do back there, and then we'll go to random...all of that stuff. [laughter] So, anyone up here have a question for any of the three of us, we'll start right there.

maria

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harriet

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editing

How did you keep track of all the characters?

There are, what? What are we up to, like 2800 named characters in the Wheel of Time? [laughter] It's more than two thousand; it was more than two thousand when I started, and it was like 2400 or something like that when I started, and I've added a few. So, how can we keep track of all of these characters? That actually is when people ask me, what the hardest part about this was, I often say that that was the hardest part. It's not just keeping track of them, because actually keeping track of them is somewhat easy; there's lots of fan resources, which I use. The Encyclopaedia-WoT is my favorite, though tarvalon.net runs a very nice Wiki which goes more in-depth and things. And keeping track—that's the easy part. The harder part is, Robert Jordan gave them all voices, right? Everybody talked in their own way, and was their own person, and when, you know, Perrin is traveling with like three random Wise Ones, they're all individual personalities, and so before I could write a scene, I had to go back and remind myself, how each of these three people...what their attitudes were, and how they spoke, that sort of thing. It was very difficult.

I don't know if you—I mean, I tell this story; I don't know if you guys have heard this before—but the level of detail Robert Jordan went into in the worldbuilding...there was one point where I was working on Towers of Midnight, and I sent an email to Maria saying, "I can't keep track of who is with Perrin. Do you have just a list somewhere?" And I was really just meaning the Wise Ones, right? And, you know, named characters. Maria comes back and says, "Well I just dug this out of the notes; I hadn't seen it before. Maybe this will help. It's a file called 'With Perrin'". I went, "Oh, good." And I opened it up...no, that's not what it is; it is the names of all the Two Rivers folk who haven't been named in the books yet. [laughter] ...who are traveling with Perrin, and often a little bit about each of them, and a list of several dozen names of people who haven't been named yet. That's the level of detail we're talking about with this, and it was a challenge; it was a challenge on all of us.

Fortunately, we did have Maria and Alan, who we should mention—Alan Romanczuk, who is also one of the assistants and very good at this sort of thing, and I would focus my writing, particularly in first draft, on just getting the emotional content of a scene down, right? Get the narrative flow down, make sure it's working, and I would try to get all the voices of the characters right, but I wouldn't worry as much about continuity. I would then send it to Maria, and she would send back this thing with all of these notes saying, "Oh Brandon. Oh Brandon, you can't do this." "Oh Brandon, you killed her." "Oh Brandon..." You know, stuff like that. You see her shaking her head over each of these things. And then we would try and fix all of the problems caused by that, and that's kind of how it went.

brandon on writing wot

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fandom

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perrin

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rj's notes

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alan

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maria

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team jordan

Was there a character that you took in a different direction than Robert Jordan had originally intended?

Not specifically against his wishes. If it was in the notes, talking about a character...one of our first requirements, and I put it on myself on this, was to avoid going in different a direction from Robert Jordan with anything, specifically because I didn't want these books to become about me. I wanted them to remain the Wheel of Time. Now, I had to be nudged by Harriet at several points early on. She would tell me, you have to change some of these things. You do have to be willing to write the book as it needs to be written; Robert Jordan wouldn't have stuck to this outline exactly, and if you did stick to it exactly, it would feel like it doesn't have any life to it.

And so, there are times, when I was working, and mostly these are plot things—I would say, "You know what, we need to change this." An example of this is in The Gathering Storm, there's a scene—it's not too bad; it's not a big spoiler [laughter]—but there are several scenes where Egwene is having dinner with the Amyrlin. Well, that was originally in Robert Jordan's notes as one scene, and I split it to two scenes, where there's a dinner, it breaks, and then we come back, and I put some things in between because with the narrative flow of that sequence, it felt more powerful for me to work with it that way. I didn't remove any of the things that Robert Jordan said to have happen, and used several of his scenes that he'd written to construct those, but in that case, I felt that moving it around like that made for a better book. And so that's the sort of thing I would change.

I will say that, early on, when I first met with them, I did say, "I would like to have a character that I can just kind of do whatever I want with," so that I have, you know...it was kind of, maybe hubristic of me or whatever—I wanted to do that, I'm like, "Can I have one to play with? I want an Asha'man to play with." And it was actually Maria who suggested Androl, and said "Go look at him; there's not a lot written about him. The personality, Robert Jordan doesn't have much written down for who he is, and he seems like he's well-poised to do this. That would be a very good one." So Androl, almost everything that's happening with him, Robert Jordan didn't say "Do it with him." There are things I have him doing that Robert Jordan said, in this notes, "This has to happen." But I specifically took Androl as a character and went places with him.

brandon on writing wot

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harriet

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maria

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androl

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rj's notes

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who wrote what?

Did you insert a character based on yourself in the books like you did with fans?

Let me answer that in reverse. The whole fan name thing, where it came from is, I wrote the first book, The Gathering Storm, and I got several notes from Maria that said, "You know, a lot of your names don't feel right. They don't feel like Wheel of Time names." And it was one of the areas that, fans noticed it too when the book came out. I named people like I name people, and so for Towers of Midnight, I felt, "I need to radically change the way I name. I need to use Robert Jordan's methods." So while talking to Maria and Harriet, Harriet told me this wonderful story where...you think he named someone after...(to Harriet)...a washing machine, was it? You remember you said, like there's a little name on one of the washing machines...was it you?

Harriet McDougal

The stove.

Maria Simons

The stove is a Jenn Air, and every time I looked at it, I would think of the Jenn Aiel. [laughter]

Harriet McDougal

And at one point I was taking allergy medicine, and whoever considered Corianin's surname—Seldane?

Brandon Sanderson

And there's an Ogier St. in Charleston. And beyond that, Robert Jordan was naming a lot of characters in the books off of mythological figures, with some twists. And so I felt—I actually said, "I'm going to grab a phone book, and I'm just going to go looking for names and try and tweak those names to start naming in the Wheel of Time." And when I did that, I stopped and thought, "Wait a minute. I had a list of names; it's in the list of the names of the fans who were part of this one charity drive we did." So I just started grabbing their names; that's as random as the phone book for me, and that's where the naming [characters] after fans thing came from. It was me forcing myself to try and do something different in the way that I'd been naming.

Now, back to the original question, did I name anything after myself: Actually, there's a cameo by Robert Jordan in the books, of Robert Jordan. Do you guys know what it is? If you know, raise your hands. If you don't know...most of you do know? No, most of you don't know. There is a statue of Robert Jordan in the books. It is discovered among the ter'angreal that were originally in Rhuidean, right? Rhuidean? No, Ebou Dar; that's right, it's the Ebou Dar cache. See, that's why I looked at Maria, and I'm like, "Where did they come from?" And there's a man that has the contents of many stories contained, and that was described to look like Robert Jordan.

I gave myself a similar cameo to that, in that, one of the times when I was visiting Charleston, Wilson—who was Robert Jordan's cousin, and they were very dear friends, like siblings—was taking Robert Jordan's weapons collection, and figuring out what to do with, and he had so many weapons. [laughter] It was really awesome to go walking through his workshop, so to speak—where he'd work—and see all these weapons, and see all of the different versions of the ashandarei that he had, and you can just imagine him swinging them about and deciding how he was going to do this, and describing certain weapons. He had everything, and so he'd use it. And Wilson was doing this, and he said to me, "Brandon, go out there and pick one, anything you want. Go grab one." And so, I couldn't pass up an opportunity like that, stunned though I was, and I went out there and I found at the very back a katana with a scabbard that had a red-and-gold dragon on it, twisting around the scabbard. And I don't know if the idea for Rand's dragons came first, and then he bought the scabbard and the sword because it looked like that, or if that was part of the inspiration. I suspect it was the former, that he saw that and thought, "Wow, that's just like the..."

But either way, I picked that one, and then I wrote that sword into the books, which you will find if you look around; that sword is mentioned. So that's my cameo, is I put my sword in. It now hangs on my wall, inside a case—my wife had it, got a case and a little plaque that says "Let the Dragon ride again on the winds of time," underneath. And it hangs on my wall with Robert Jordan's birthdate underneath it.

brandon on writing wot

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fan names in the books

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wot influences

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cameos

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harriet

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wilson

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justice

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ashandarei

How do Michael and Kate Reading keep track of all the voices doing the audiobooks?

(to Harriet and Maria) Do either of you know? (demur) No idea. [laughter] Sorry; easy answer, but we have no idea. You'll have to ask them.

wot audiobooks

Alright, I finished the book...

Okay, no spoilers about the book itself, please.

Question

There are characters we've been with for twenty years or so who don't survive this book. How do you choose when characters meet perhaps an untimely end in a book? [laughter]

Brandon Sanderson

For this book in specific, there are characters that Robert Jordan left notes on requiring what would happen to certain characters; he was actually fairly detailed. There are a couple of cases where we made decisions on our own, and in any case, when a character dies in a book, I am trying to do what is best for that character and for the emotional beats of the storytelling. I don't look at it as killing off characters; I look at it as letting characters take risks, the risks that they would demand of me that they be allowed to take, and if those risks don't occasionally come with consequences, then there is no story to me, because there is no tension, and there is no possibility for things to go wrong, and without that possibility, I wouldn't be able to write the books. I would be unable to write novels if the characters were unable to have actual danger from the actions that they're taking.

And so, I make these decisions based on what the character demands and what the story demands. It's never easy. I don't sit there gleefully, as I do imagine certain writers doing [laughter], who will remain unnamed [laughter], saying, "What two don't they expect me to kill, and how can I do it in a really, really brutal way?" [laughter] And that's a certain skill that certain authors have; that's not how I approach it. It's what the story demands of me, is how I approach it, and in some cases what Robert Jordan demanded of me. I agree with everyone that he killed, though. [laughter] I felt that it was right for the story.

a memory of light

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brandon on writing

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brandon on writing wot

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rj's notes

With the Oath Rod, the Aes Sedai obviously were not using it for its intended purpose. Let's talk about those two ter'angreal that they had in the White Tower, the one that they raise the Aes Sedai with, and the one that the Accepted use. And I'm curious, what was the intended purpose back in the Age of Legends for those?

Okay, excellent question; I'll repeat it just for those who might not have been able to hear it. We know that the Aes Sedai are using certain ter'angreal for things other than their original intended purpose, such as the Oath Rod and the ones they use in the raising ceremonies. (to Maria) What were their intended purposes? [laughter]

Maria Simons

I don't know. [laughter, applause]

Brandon Sanderson

Sorry. Robert Jordan could answer that. Sometimes we can't.

oath rod

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aes sedai

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ter'angreal

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white tower

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age of legends

Where do we go to learn how to pronounce some of these names?

On the encyclopaedia-wot, he actually pronounces them and has audio files. (to Maria) Am I correct? (Maria agrees.) And he's dead on. And I actually—it's kind of a fun story here. When I found that out, before I even started writing—because I was embarrassed about my pronunciations, and I still don't get some of them right—I went and I downloaded all of those, because he has just a batch file that you can download, and I put them on my iPod to shuffle between my songs, and so occasionally—even still—when I'm working out, I'll be sitting there, you know, going along on the treadmill, and then the song ends and I hear, "Rhuidean", and then I go back [laughter] Oh, I don't get that one right? No. Wait, are you sure I don't get that one right? Rhuidean. What did you say? (Maria pronounces Rhuidean.) Okay, "Rhuidean". There's a story, though. I once asked how to pronounce Morgase's name, and these two disagreed, and had a nice argument about it over dinner. [laughter]

Maria Simons

Another place for some pronunciations: At Dragonmount they have a 4th Age podcast, and at one point they interviewed me and Alan and had us go down a huge list of things for pronunciation, and it's still on Dragonmount somewhere.

Harriet McDougal

But it's my considered opinion, that however you pronounce any of the names, you are right. [laughter, applause]

The list of pronunciations linked to the podcast transcript is transcribed phonetically, compared side by side with glossary pronunciations. (Sometimes contrasted.) You can also find official pronunciations in the composite glossary, including Morgase.

pronunciation

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fandom

How much of the last books were completed, or do you have an idea of the percent before you took over?

Fortunately I can fall back on Tom Doherty, who answered this question, so I don't get in trouble. And I don't usually—I get in trouble a little bit sometimes. [laughter] There are certain things that I have to be careful not to say, to get into spoilers and things like that, but Tom Doherty did answer this. There were about 200 pages of material that was done, and that did include lots of different things. It included completed scenes; it included dictations that he'd done while he was sick; and it included fragments of scenes, and in some places, some Q&As with Maria and Alan, where they would say "You said this about a character; can you go more in depth on that?" And then there's like a page of him talking about that character and that scene, and those 200 pages were given to me, and I have used that as a guide in writing the books.

There were holes. There were some very big holes, which actually was exciting to me in some ways, because it allowed me to actually be part of this, rather than following a very strict "This happens, this happens, this happens." In fact, they weren't in order, which was also exciting to me, because I work from an outline, and Robert Jordan didn't. Robert Jordan knew where he was going, but he would often discover what was going on as he got the characters there. They call that a 'gardener'; it's George R.R. Martin's term for writing; it's how George R.R. Martin; it's how Robert Jordan wrote books; it's how Stephen King writes books. There are others of us that, we are more 'architects'; we build a structure, and then we work from that, and I was able to take all of these things and build a structure from it, and one of the gems in there was what is now the epilogue of the book you're holding, which was finished almost in its entirety—that whole sequence, with very minor tweaks by us—and that ending is the last scene that Robert Jordan talked about many times, that he knows how the book ends; he knows how the series ends. He did write that before he passed away, and that became like my goalpost; that was the thing I had to hit, was that scene, and everything leading up to that was to make that scene work. And so, when you get there, you can read...that epilogue is all Robert Jordan. Significant chunks of the rest of the books were too, but that one, you can just use as a marker, and say "Okay, this is his ending."

There is some clarification on the issue of the epilogue here.

brandon on writing wot

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rj's notes

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the last scene

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who wrote what?

How was Old Tongue created? Was it based on another language, or was it just off the top of his head?

It was based on a lot of different languages. He had shelves and shelves of language books—every language, practically, known to man—but it was a lot of creativity on his part to put it all together.

Brandon Sanderson

Another fun story here. At one point, when I was visiting Charleston, I was talking about the mythological significance of certain things, and I'm like, "I can't figure out the mythological significance of the ashandarei." I knew pieces of Mat's mythological significance—not based on language, but the mythology—and Harriet said, "Oh, I know where it came from." She ran out to his library, selected a specific volume, came back with it and gave it to me and said, "It's this chapter right here." And showed me a chapter in that book that I could read that talked about the mythological significance of that specific piece of the Wheel of Time world. And so, there are all sorts of things like that that he used.

old tongue

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ashandarei

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mat

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harriet

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wot influences

That charity drive that you draw names from? Originally it was mentioned that they would be represented by a group, or army at the Last Battle. What group?

You will find them in there. They call them Dragonsworn. They are a group of unaligned Dragonsworn which include people who have just left their oaths behind and joined this group. There are Aes Sedai in there; there are Aiel in there; there are people from all around, and that group represents the fandom. They just call themselves the Dragonsworn.

fan names in the books

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fandom

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a memory of light

I love all the books first off, but this question is for Harriet. Harriet, how did you find and believe that Brandon could be the guy to bring it all back and finish this fantastic world?

A friend from Minneapolis was visiting me in the week of Robert Jordan's funeral, and she came up to me—I was sitting at the dinner table [?]—and she said "You need to read this." It was Brandon's eulogy for Robert Jordan which he had posted online, and Elise Mattheson is her name, and Elise knows that I am something of Luddite, so she couldn't just say, "Here's a good link." [laughter] If she put it in front of me on paper, I would read it. And I thought, my goodness, this is just the feeling for Robert Jordan's work, that I would like to see in anyone who was going to finish the books.

So then I called Tom Doherty, who is of course the publisher of Brandon's own individual works, and said, "What do you think?" And since he's a publisher, he began telling me sales figures. [laughter] And I had no particular interest, and I said, "Would you send me one of his books, please?" And he said, "Yeah, I'll send you Mistborn; Elantris is a good book, but it's a first novel—if any of you are in the industry, you know first novels are misleading; you have to look at something later—so I read the first forty-seven pages of this book, and it was a period of enormous stress, and I should say that, as a professional editor, if I'm reading a book, and I want to go to sleep, I can't do it until I know the story is in good hands. Otherwise I'm going to keep reading it until I throw the book across the room and say "This is lousy." [laughter]

Anyway, I fell asleep after forty-seven pages, not because I was bored, but because it was good. And when I woke up, the world, the characters, the conflict, even what they ate—everything was clear. And I said to myself, "This guy can do it." So I called Tom, and said, "I think this guy can do it." And he said, "You don't think you ought to read the whole book?" [laughter] It was a pretty important decision. And I said, "If I were asking him to write a Brandon Sanderson novel, then I would have to read the whole book, but I'm not." [laughter] "I'm asking him to write a Robert Jordan." And that's how it began.

And then...[?] and I thought, "Well, Brandon Sanderson in Provo, Utah...how many can there be?" So I called Information and got a woman on the phone, and I said, "This is Brandon Sanderson?" and she said yes. And I said, "Hi, my name is Harriet McDougal; I'm Robert Jordan's widow, and I'm wondering whether your husband would have interest..." And she said, "I don't know what you're talking about...Books?" It wasn't the same Brandon Sanderson. [laughter] So then I called Tor, and said, "What's Brandon's number?" That was how it started. [laughter, applause]

Brandon Sanderson

That Brandon was actually a wrestler, like a high school or college wrestler. Not a pro wrestler, you know, an actual wrestler. And people always asked me if I was him when I was first published. And now I hear they all ask him if he's me. [laughter]

harriet

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tom doherty

What is the identity of the woman who came to Aviendha in the Waste?

Why, her name is Nakomi. [laughter] Obviously.

Question

That's an Aes Sedai answer.

Harriet McDougal

Heh heh heh. [laughter, applause]

Brandon Sanderson

If you read online, there are many fan theories which may engage you. How about this, I’ll give you an official RAFO. There is at least one clue in this book.

nakomi

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a memory of light

How did this prepare you to write The Stormlight Archive series?

There’s actually a good story there because Way of Kings, the first Stormlight Archive, was the book I was writing when I first sold Elantris. Elantris was my first published, but it wasn’t my first written. It was my sixth novel. It was the first one that was actually somewhat decent. But I was writing number thirteen when I got the offer on it. You’ll find that’s very common among authors—it doesn’t happen to all of us, but a lot of us, we write for a long time, until we get it done—and I had just finished Way of Kings, and it was not right yet. In fact, when I sold Elantris, TOR wanted to buy two books from me, and my editor asked, you know—"Send me what you're working on right now." And I sent him Way of Kings, and he said "Wow, this is awesome, but number one, it's enormous! I’m not sure we can publish this, at least in one volume from a new author." Later on I was able to convince them that it should be one volume. But that's when I had a little more clout, and they could print more copies which drives the prices down for printing them. But also, it just wasn't right yet; the book was not right. And I said to my editor, "I'm okay with not publishing it now, because I don't know what's wrong with it." As a writer I think it was just too ambitious for me at the time, I just couldn't do it yet. And it wasn't until I'd written Gathering Storm in its entirety that I started to figure out what I'd been doing wrong.

It was actually managing viewpoints, was one of the things. During the reread of Robert Jordan's entire series I noticed how he gathered the viewpoints together. When you start writing a big epic fantasy series, and you feel like, "Well, they have so many characters, I want to start with that." And the reason on the draft of Way of Kings, I started with—all over the world, I had all these viewpoints and things like this, and the book was kind of a train wreck because of it. Where, if you read Eye of the World, Robert Jordan starts with them all together, and then slowly builds complexity, and even the later books he's grouping the characters together so even if they have individual story lines going on they're in the same place so they can interact with each other and there's clusters of them in different places.

And that was one thing. Working on The Gathering Storm I've learned how to make my characters...also how to use viewpoint the way he did, how to manage subtlety—he was so subtle with a lot of his writing—and some of these things, it all started to click in my head. And I actually I called my agent and said, "I need to do Way of Kings RIGHT NOW," and he's like "Are you sure? Because you kind of have a lot on your plate." And I'm like, "I need to do it; it's going to be fast, because I know how to do it now." And so I actually took time off between Gathering Storm and Towers of Midnight and re-wrote Way of Kings from scratch. Took me about six months, which is amazingly fast for a book of that length. And then I showed it to my editor, and it was right this time. And it's hard to explain many of the specifics. It's just, you know...it's like how do you know you can lift this weight after you've been lifting these other weights? When you've worked hard enough, that you've gained the muscle mass to do it. And lifting...writing the Wheel of Time was heavy lifting. And that's how it happened. I do apologize the sequel is taking so long, but after that deviation to the first one, which I could do very quickly, I couldn't stop to write the second one after Towers of Midnight because the second one would take too long, and delay the last book too long. And so, I am getting back to the Stormlight now—I am working on the second book—but I had other obligations first that were very important, and they're why you're here, so... [laughter]

brandon on writing wot

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stormlight archive

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way of kings

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moshe

When you first read Robert Jordan's ending, did you have a clear-cut idea of what you wanted to do with the series, or did it develop over time?

Excellent question, and the answer is it developed over time. Specifically, after I read that ending, I started to reread the whole series—the first time I'd read the series knowing I was going to be part of the series which...you have to approach it very differently, knowing you're going to be a part of it. And I took all of those notes, and I reread the series, and I built an outline using Robert Jordan's scenes as touchstones. A lot of times when you're building an outline—even Robert Jordan who was more of a discovery writer, I heard from Harriet did it this way—you kind of plan your book like you would plan a road trip, where you know you're starting in D.C. and you're going to end in San Diego, and outlining for me is putting in between them all the road markers of places you're going to go, and so I laid down this map where I said, "Okay, here's a scene he wrote; let's go there. Here's another scene he wrote; then we'll go there. Here is another scene..." and I used those as my touchstones to get me across this map toward the ending.

And I then had places where there were gaps, where I didn't know what happened in between, and that's where I would fill it out. "This is what I'm going to do here..." And I actually did a lot of that with Harriet and Maria and Alan in Charleston where we sat down, and I actually got big sheets of butcher paper—because I can be a visual thinker at times—and I would start with a character and start writing down where I thought they should go, and pitch different things to them. And I usually had a couple of different ideas, and they'd say, "Oh, this feels right; this doesn't feel right," that sort of thing. And together, we hashed that all out for all three books, because they were one book in our head then. One very long book, but one book. [laughter] And I then took those sheets of butcher's paper and typed it all out into a big, massive outline, which then I used across the next five years, working on the books, as my data post, and I used that to point me toward that ending. And that's where it came from.

brandon on writing wot

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team jordan

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rj's notes

Alright, so. We're going to go ahead and, I'm going to turn this over to the bookstore people, who are going to explain to you what to do, but I do want to give you all a very big thank you.