Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

Hailing Frequency interview featured in the Walden Books sci-fi/fantasy newsletter, issue 4 in October/November of 1993.

Readers who like their fantasy on the grand scale, with a large cast of characters, a far-ranging geography, and a deeply layered history have been turning to Robert Jordan's epic, "The Wheel of Time," of which The Shadow Rising is the fourth installment. (Previous volumes include The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, and The Dragon Reborn, all from Tor.) The series is abundantly complex and resonates with depth, so recently when we asked Robert Jordan for a brief summary of the action to date, the author laughed.

I don't think it's possible to summarize the story briefly. There's too much going on. For the last book, The Dragon Reborn, the publisher asked me for a synopsis of the first two books; it was to be sent out with review copies in case the reviewer had not read them. The synopsis was seven or eight pages long—I could not get it down any further. My editor tried to cut it down some, too, but she couldn't find a way to take out more than a page or so on each book.

rj on writing

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harriet

Having seen your series grow from what you thought might be five books, to seven, do you find yourself rearranging events in your original outline so each book has an independent structure with climaxes and growth of its own?

Yes, to some extent, but it's worse than that. I originally thought of it as one book. Well, by the time I went to the publisher, I realized that, no, one book wouldn't do it. I really thought it would be two, or three maybe, but I wasn't sure. But yes, there has been some rearrangement of events—surprisingly little though. I have been startled at how little I have had to shift the major points. Of course, a lot of them are floating, if you will. That's partly because, in the outline, the high points are not fixed—I never intended them to occur in a specific order. They were things that I knew had to happen for the development of one character or another, but there was always some allowance in my mind for things to shift.

rj on writing

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how many more books?

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characterization

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plotting

What are some of the things that have shifted and/or expanded as the books have started to fall into place?

Well, the characters, of course, have grown in directions I didn't quite expect. Or rather in ways that I didn't expect. It always happens that way...they're like mushrooms you know. The general outline I started with is still there. The high points that I'm aiming at are still there. But I've simply realized that telling the story is taking a little more time than I thought it would.

rj on writing

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characterization

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plotting

Your characters were fairly young when the series started. Did you do that with the idea of picking up an audience that would grow along with the series?

Hailing Frequency

Robert Jordan

rj on writing

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harriet

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characterization

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fandom

There's an enormous geographical and historical sweep in this book. How much of this was defined when you began? What kinds of things are you finding in those obscure places on the map that the characters are getting to for the first time?

Well, the cultures, the people they meet in different countries, were only very sketchy in the beginning. They're really no more divergent than the United States, France, and Germany were before you had television and movies. So there are well-defined national distinctions of dress and behavior and on top of that, national reputations in other countries. You know Americans are so and so, Germans are like this, [fill in the blank]. As far as the rest of it goes, there is perhaps more of a difference in the cultures than is explained by the size of the continent. In an earlier book, one of the characters talks about humanity falling back and shrinking, that nations were not there any more. National borders don't always run straight up to one another, and there are sometimes very large unclaimed spaces between countries. That sort of thing makes for more isolation, and of course, isolation makes for cultures being more different.

rj on writing

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wot cultures

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ingtar

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geography

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worldbuilding

In many places in "The Wheel of time," a careful reader will spot echoes of other myth cycles—the sword in the stone, for example. Do these things happen fortuitously or are they laid on in advance, intentionally as it were?

Well, they were laid on in advance. There are elements from Norse, Chinese, Japanese, and American Indian mythologies, to name just a few. I think it adds resonance to the story, although I've taken great care not to follow the older material in any slavish way. Occasionally, I will add in details here or there, and then discover that I have done something that is absolutely authentic to the myth I was working from. This is not automatic writing or channeling or being guided by something from the Great Beyond, it's simply that I have done a great deal of reading on these subjects and things bubble up in the back of my head all the time.

wot influences

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rj on writing

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arthurian legend

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callandor

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plotting

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rj on reading

How would you compare this multi-volume spinning-out of a single story with the "Conan" books, where you did a number of individual works that were part of a larger, but rather looser, series?

No comparison. I've made an effort to make each book stand by itself, but at the same time, I've tried to make each one a real part of the whole "Wheel of Time." In something like the "Conan" series, the books are really independent; there is no real relationship between them. In this series, while you could read The Shadow Rising first, and enjoy it, I think, you are going to get more out of it if you have read the first three books. You will pick up things that will seem different because of things you know from the first three books, things that are different from what they seem on the surface. There's a slightly different cast to things that people say and do.

rj on writing

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where to start

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conan