linuxmafia.com 2016/linuxmafia.com.tar/linuxmafia.com/pub/jordan/RJstuff/ff-interview.txt

Internet Message Format | 1995-04-27 | 17KB

From: [e-mail] (Nine Tiger)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan

     The following interview with Robert Jordan was taped on
November 1, 1994 at ACT Studios in Arlington, Virginia for FAST
FORWARD: CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE FICTION.

      FAST FORWARD is a half-hour public access television
program produced monthly and broadcast on cable systems in the
Greater Washington, D.C. area, and on systems in Minnesota and
New York City.  Each program consists of book and media reviews,
listings of upcoming area events of interest to fans of science
fiction and fantasy, and an extended interview with an author,
editor or artist.  FAST FORWARD is a production of Da'Guys, Inc.,
in cooperation with Arlington Community Television, Channel 33.

     Featured guests on FAST FORWARD in 1994 included Paula
Volsky, Michael Swanwick, Brian Jacques, Lois McMaster Bujold and
Josepha Sherman.  The interview with Mr. Jordan starts off the
1995 series of broadcasts, airing during January on the D.C. area
cable systems.  Future 1995 programs will feature interviews with
Tad Williams, Jane Yolen and Greg Bear.  If you have any
questions or comments, the producers can be reached at
[e-mail]
*****************************************************************
     Robert Jordan Interview on FAST FORWARD: CONTEMPORARY
SCIENCE FICTION

FAST FORWARD:  We're back, and we're here with the author of THE
WHEEL OF TIME fantasy series, Robert Jordan.  Welcome back, sir.

Robert Jordan:  Thank you for having me.

FF:  When we talked last, you had just finished the third book in
THE WHEEL OF TIME series, THE DRAGON REBORN.

RJ:  Yes.

FF: Since then, on a regular basis, like clockwork, a novel of
six to seven hundred pages has arrived at bookstores everywhere
in October, the latest of which is LORD OF CHAOS.  Now that's
six.  When we talked the last time you were here, you didn't have
a definite number of volumes that the story was going to take to
tell.  At the time you had estimated six or seven -- it was very
nebulous.  We're at number six, and after having read the book,
my impression was that it was going to take more than one more
novel to complete this story.

RJ:  Oh, yes.

FF:  Do you have a feel for how much longer it will take?  Any
ideas?

RJ:  There will be several more books.

FF:  Several.

RJ:  There will be some more books.  There will be a FEW more
books.  But not too many.

FF:  Not too many.

RJ:  I know the last scene of the last book, I've known it from
the beginning, I just have to get there.

FF:  Well, let's talk about getting there.  Let's talk about the
process.  Let's take a look at LORD OF CHAOS from the moment you
start it.

RJ:  All right.

FF:  Because you are walking toward a final scene, and because
you aren't sure how long it's going to take to get there, in
terms of the events that are going to happen, the people that we
are going to meet -- let's talk about how you wrote LORD OF
CHAOS, and the discipline you placed upon yourself to generate
this 700 page book.  How did you go about putting this last novel
together?

RJ:  Well, first off, along with knowing what the last scene is,
there are certain events that I know I want to happen.  Certain
things that I want to happen, both in relationships between
people, and in the world, if you will.  I picked out some of
those events to see if I could fit them in -- from the position
everyone was in, the position the world was in at the end of the
last book.  I then began to roughly sketch out how I would get
from one of those to the next.  And then I sat down and began
writing, in the beginning eight hours a day, five or six days a
week.  And -- I do my rewriting while I am doing the writing.
When I hit the end, I only allow myself to give a final polish.
I keep going back while I am writing and rewriting the previous
stuff.  By the end of the book I was doing twelve to fourteen
hours a day, seven days a week.  I did that for the last five
months of LORD OF CHAOS, except that I did take one week off to
go fly fishing with some brothers and cousins and nephews up in
the Big Horn and Yellowstone.  It was terrific.  It kept my brain
from melting.

FF:  The more intense schedule -- was this a more difficult book
to write and get to the end of, in terms of the amount of time
you had to spend than some of the others in the series?

RJ:  No, not really.  They're ALL like that.  The only difficulty
this time was that I perhaps went to the seven day a week and
fourteen hour day a little sooner that I would normally.  Partly
that's because each of these books takes MORE than a year to
write.  The publisher likes to publish them once a year, though.
With the result that with each book I've slipped a little bit
more beyond the deadline, and I DON'T LIKE being beyond the
deadline.  So the further beyond the deadline I get, the more I
want to put the pedal to the floor and get done.


FF:  Does having to put that much time in per day affect your
focus, your ability to work?  I mean, do you ever get the feeling
when you turn something in that if you had another month to do it
you could have put more of a "shine" on it, or are you satisfied
with the product when it is turned in?

RJ:  I'm satisfied and I'm not satisfied.  It doesn't have
anything to do with the time.  The effect of the time is that I
have to work to disengage my mind so that I can go to sleep.  I
have to read somebody else who will engage my thoughts.  Charles
Dickens is always great for that.  If I don't do that, I will lie
there all night thinking about what I'm writing, sure that I will
go to sleep in just a few minutes now, and then it gets light
outside, and I haven't been to sleep yet.  What happens is that I
get this DESIRE to keep writing.  Once upon a time, before I was
married, I used to write for thirty hours at a stretch.

FF:  Good Lord.

RJ:  And then I would sleep for nine or ten.  I didn't do this
all year round, it was just when I was working on a book.  When I
get going, I want to keep going.  And about the other thing, I
ALWAYS think I can make the book better.  I'd probably spend
five, six, ten years on a book if I was left to myself, trying to
polish each phrase.  So it's just as well I do have deadlines to
bring me into the real world.

FF:  When you started this series, with EYE OF THE WORLD -- it
came put in trade paperback, the second book came out in trade
paperback, and then they started coming out, initial releases, in
hard cover.

RJ:  They were in hard cover at the beginning, also.

FF:  For the library editions.

RJ:  Yes, and it was very small printings.  The publisher did not
even offer them to bookstores.  And the publisher was frankly
quite surprised when book stores found out about the hard covers
and began ordering them.  After all, it's a very fat book, a very
EXPENSIVE book by an essentially unknown writer.  They didn't
think anybody but libraries would buy it.

FF:  Did you think it would be the kind of phenomenon it is?  The
last two have been on the best seller lists.

RJ:  Are you kidding?!

FF:  Did you have any idea it was going to have this kind of
success?

RJ:  Of course not!  I mean you hope for something like this.
Nobody writes a book and hopes for a flop.  And, all right, maybe
if you write something you've turned out in a month just to get
enough money to pay the rent, you're not hoping really, with any
real thought of it making THE NEW YORK TIMES, say.  But any book
you write ordinarily, you hope it's going to be successful, and
maybe in the back of your head there's some little dream that,
"Yes this one, this one will make THE TIMES.  And they'll invite
me to Stockholm as well."  You know, if your going to dream, why
not dream?  But practicality says, "Forget it Jack."

FF:  But there's additional pressure when you have this level of
success.  I recently plugged into the Internet -- late in my
life, of course.  But I'm there and I'm mostly lurking.  You have
an extremely intense following on the Net.  You have your own
board and discussion group for THE WHEEL OF TIME.

RJ:  So I've been told.

FF:  You have a group of incredibly dedicated fans who have
labeled themselves "the Darkfriends."

RJ:  I've heard about that, too.

FF:  Which is a little strange, that they're identifying with the
people your protagonists are struggling against.

RJ:  Well, some people think the snake has all the lines. (Sorry
George).

FF:  And your work has undergone an INCREDIBLY intense analysis.
I mean, you have people dissecting PARAGRAPHS, trying to find
hidden meanings, trying to forecast future events.  Trying to
determine where you drew certain elements of the religions and
the beliefs and the customs that you have presented in these six
books.

RJ:  It's all part of the plan.  (Laughs)

FF: It's all part of the plan?

RJ:  Well, not really. Not that anybody would go into that depth
of analysis.  But I want to make the books as layered as
possible, so that you could read them on the surface and have a
good time, and no more than that.  I have twelve year olds who
write me fan letters, and I'm certain that's how they read the
books.  But I wanted layers beneath that, and layers beneath
THAT, so that no matter how many times you read the books there
would always be something new to find.


FF:  Does it ever present a challenge to you, or do you ever find
it disconcerting when things that -- you have a progression of
story, you have some events you want to happen.  There are
certain things that are foreshadowed -- sometimes specifically in
dreams or in auras that are presented to particularly talented
people.  Are there ever times when people start making
assumptions that certain things are going to happen that are
either totally wrong --

RJ:  Oh YES.

FF:  -- or that you don't want them to know that much about
what's going ahead that has resulted in a rethinking how you're
going to present things?  Has it had any effect on the writing
itself?

RJ:  No. Not to any real extent.  There are two things. One,
occasionally I will find that the speculation is perhaps getting
a little too close to something that I want to keep hidden for a
while yet.  So I try to become a little more subtle in talking
about that.  The other thing is that sometimes I discover that
there's intense discussion over something that I assumed was
quite obvious.  I wasn't trying to hide anything at all, thought
I was being quite straightforward, and I think, "Maybe I need to
find a way to slip in something, a mention if it just happens to
come up anyway, to let them know that this is the way that is
supposed to be."  It's simply a matter of how things come about,
how it occurs with my work if it happens to come up.


FF:  One of the things I found particularly affecting in this
latest book -- I enjoy the major characters, I've followed the
major characters through six volumes.  But there are certain
scenes that really strike me as being very real and very
personal.  For example, in the middle of the book, Mat -- who has
been sent on a particular mission by Rand -- meets a young boy
named Olver?

RJ:  Uh-Huh.

FF:  And their meeting, where as Mat is talking to him, Olver is
showing him his possessions:  his little cache of coins, the game
his father has made for him, and his red hawk's feather and his
turtle shell.

RJ: Um-Hum.

FF:  That was a very personal moment, that was a very real, very
human moment.

RJ:  I try to make it so.

FF:  Which you don't see a lot in some fantasy.  That one, and
Rand's looking into the face of one of the maidens after she has
died protecting him from an attack.  Memorizing her face and name
because he has vowed to memorize the face and name of all the
maidens who had sworn to give their lives to protect him.  Let's
talk about that scene in particular, I'm curious about it. You
had two tours in Vietnam, you've had military experience, you're
a graduate of the Citadel.  Does something like that particularly
come out of the people you've met in the military and the kinds
of personalities you met in the military, do you draw any of that
kind of thing from that?

RJ:  Some of it.  I suppose, actually, that particular thing came
from the only time I was really shaken in combat in shooting at
somebody, or shooting AT somebody.  I had to, uh, I was shooting
back at some people on a sampan and a woman came out and pulled
up an AK-47, and I didn't hesitate about shooting her.  But that
stuck with me.  I was raised in a very old-fashioned sort of
way.  You don't hurt women -- you don't DO that.  That's the one
thing that stuck with me for a long, long time.

FF:  And that resonates in Perrin's fighting his way toward Rand
in the climatic scene in this battle.  He basically refuses to
think of them as males or females, because if he thought of the
person in front of him, trying to kill him, as a female --
because there is a mixture of both in the group they are fighting
-- he wouldn't be able to proceed, and he'd end up being killed.
So he has to blank that out of his mind so he can be purely
reactive. So it's almost a repeat of that.

RJ:  Yes, in a way it is.  It's something that comes out of the
way they think.  And it fits with the society, as well, as it's
been devised.  Three thousand years ago men destroyed the world.
In effect, O.K. it was the male Aes Sedai, but it was MEN that
did it.  For three thousand years the world has been afraid of
men who can channel.  You have that sort of history, and women
are going to have power, women are going to have influence and
prestige.  There is not going to be the same sort of subjugation
of women you find in other cultures in our world.  Given that,
and given the fact that men are, quite simply, stronger than
women.  There's no two ways about it, on the average man is
stronger than woman.

FF:  We're talking physically stronger.

RJ:  Right.  Physically stronger.  It's going to be, in many
cases, a very strong cultural prohibition against a man using
that strength against a woman.  It seemed to me to fit very well
with the way the cultures are set up.

FF:  We had talked, a little bit, about your schedule and how
much time you've had to put into the writing, especially the
latter part of a cycle of completing a book.  Do you have to
think very carefully about taking time away from the writing in
order to maintain the schedule you keep?  I know there has been
incredible interest in your book tour, which you are currently
on.  As a matter of fact, the reason you are here in Washington,
D.C. is because the fans of Robert Jordan and THE WHEEL OF TIME
in this area pitched such a fit --

RJ:  They burned a couple of embassies, I heard.

FF:  -- on the Internet, that TOR added this to your already
extensive tour schedule.  Which allows you to be here, so we
appreciate that very much -- thank you folks, for doing that.
But does it make it difficult for you to do the other things you
want to do in your life?  Do you find yourself calculating more
what it's costing you away from the book?

RJ:  Yes.  My vacations are almost inevitably now a few DAYS
tacked on to the end of a business trip.  The fishing trip was an
aberration of wild dimensions.  I stuck with that despite various
people saying, "Can you really do that, can you really take the
time out?"  I said, "I plan to get my brothers and cousins and
nephews together.  We're going to fly fish, we're going to fly
fish, I don't CARE, we're going to FLY FISH, and catch some
trout."  But generally I have to think about things like that.  I
don't go to conventions very much anymore, I used to go to a lot
of them, I don't have the time.

FF:  And that's why, of course, your time is so valuable when you
are available to people around here.  Well, WE'RE out of time, as
a matter of fact.  Mr. Jordan, thank you for being here.  Tad
Williams, when he was on this show, basically called his
DRAGONBONE CHAIR TRILOGY the "story that ate my life", which it
seems like THE WHEEL OF TIME, based on our discussion, is at
least nibbling on the edges of this portion of your life.  Which
for our sakes, in terms of finding out what the end of the story
will be, we hope won't be TOO much longer.  And for your sake
too, so that you can afford to take a couple of months to go fly
fishing with your family.

RJ:  It would be nice, but if a book is worth doing, if it's
worth wrestling down, it's always going to eat your life.

FF:  And on that note we say thank you very much.

                           ---- END ----