Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

I began writing the Wheel of Time because a great many notions had been bouncing around inside my head and they started to coalesce. I wondered what it was really like to be tapped on the shoulder and told you were born to be the savior of mankind. I didn't think it would be very much the way it is in so many books where someone pops up and says, "Hi, I was born to be the savior of mankind, and here's the prophecy," and everybody says, "Oh well, let's go then." I thought self interest would play a big part, on other peoples' parts.

And I was also wondering about the source of legends and myths. They can't all be anthropomorphizations of natural events. Some of them have to be distortions of things that actually happened, distortions by being passed down over generations. And that led into the inevitable distortion of information over distance, whether that's temporal distance or spatial distance. The further you are in time or space from the actual event, the less likely you are to know what really happened.

And then finally there was the thought about something that happens in Tolkien and a lot of other places. The wise old wizard, or whatever—the wise old fellow shows up in a small country village, and says, "You must follow me to save the world." And the villagers say, "Right then, guv, off we go!" And well, I did a lot of growing up in the country, and I've always thought that what those country folk would say is, "Oh, is that so? Look here, have another beer. Have two, on me. I'll be right back. I will, really." And then slip out the back door.

There were a lot of things that came together, and even once I started, of course, a lot of things built in, and added in, and changed.

Oh my books are fantasy, certainly. And I like the term. Of course, there are a lot of people who write fantasy who don't like the term. The Magic Realists don't like the term. You know, Doris Lessing—it's fantasy. And A. S. Byatt—it's fantasy. But there are a lot of people who write, as I say, they write fantasy and they're not going to allow "fantasy" to be put on the cover of their book because they think they're being consigned to the ghetto if that happens. Well, okay. I wear my ghetto tattoos proudly.

I wrote New Spring to be accessible to someone who has read none of the books. That is, somebody who's read the books is going to find a few things explained in New Spring, such as what the One Power is, things that they've already had explained, things that they know. But I simply decided to go along with the way that I had done it in the novella. This is to be accessible to someone who's never read a book in the Wheel of Time.