How The Wheel of Time Killed My Writing Career
I didn’t like my Dad. Most of the time he was an abusive alcoholic. But I did learn some important, helpful lessons from him. One of them was the joy of reading.
Dad read voraciously. He spent half my childhood on the couch, his nose in a book and his gigantic, dual-volume Reader’s Digest dictionary close at hand. Reading was the one thing he approved of, that he wouldn’t tease me or yell at me for doing, so I read as much as possible.
For him it was Wilbur Smith and Ken Follett and Edward Rutherford. He liked historical fiction but would read anything except fantasy. He viewed it as a lesser, childish genre.
Which is unfortunate because I loved fantasy. Growing up in the 80s and 90s it was Piers Anthony, Mercedes Lackey, Andre Norton, David Eddings, and Tolkien. The worlds they created captured my imagination.
It wasn’t enough to just read about them, though. I wanted to create. I wanted to write. I’d spend hours drawing fantasy maps with painstaking detail, carefully placing the little dots where cities would lie, forging formidable mountain ranges and treacherous forests.
The reading led to a knack for writing. Very early on I grasped sentence structure and knew how to build suspense by emulating the authors I read. I could write dialogue, set scenes and had good fiction instincts. My essays and stories were read to the class since elementary. If I had a mentor or parents who cared for and encouraged me, I might be a successful author right now.
But even without that encouragement I still might have gone on to write great works, but someone came along when I was young and impressionable and ruined all of that.
His name was James Oliver Rigney Junior, better known as fantasy author Robert Jordan.
The first book of The Wheel of Time was released January 15, 1990. I was ten years old. I didn’t encounter the series until I was about 15 years old.
I was in my grade ten thematic literature class. There was a new kid at the school, which was a rare occurrence in the isolation I grew up in. During class our teacher gave us fifteen minutes of reading time. He insisted on it (thank you Mr. Duffy).
The kid’s name was Adam. He was reading a thick, attractive looking volume entitled The Dragon Reborn.
I asked him if it was any good, then something strange happened.
He paused and this small smile crept over his face. He gave me this look, like I couldn’t possibly understand the importance of what I was about to hear. He leaned forward slightly and said quietly, “Yes. It is good.” I know it sounds simple, but there was magic in those words. Suddenly I had to read it. I’d gone through every book with a horse and a sword in the library, and was starved for something new.
So, I signed out The Eye of the World and began a multi-year literary odyssey that destroyed my writing career.
The Wheel of Time was amazing. People who grew up on George Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire don’t know what Robert Jordan did for the genre. It was intense, beautiful, grand in scope, suspenseful, and approached the genre in a whole new way. Politics and mystery, an astonishingly deep history, dynamic, evolving characters, and a world that appeared in your mind as clearly as a film.
And that was the problem.
Robert Jordan puts you there. His books are thick with description. Description is what kept the damn thing from ending, because there wasn’t a blade of grass or a breeze of wind that didn’t get at least half a paragraph of description.
And it worked. In a crowded town or out in the desert or approaching the seat of evil in the Blight, I could see the world, taste it, smell it.
And suddenly, I had to be that good. I had to write just as descriptively or it wasn’t really writing. I was so young and impressionable and the books were so new and gripping that nothing else could measure up. I didn’t read anything else and didn’t want to write unless it was as grand and detailed as The Wheel of Time.
I stayed in that world for so long. I devoured the books and reread them when I’d caught up to the pace of publishing. It shaped how I thought and how I wrote, from high school to university.
The problem was it didn’t end.
The last book I read was the eighth volume, The Path of Daggers. After that I started the series again to pass the time until the next release, but I gave up. The series had finally exhausted me so I abandoned it.
But the damage to my creative writing was done.
Based on all the writing advice I found at the time, if you wanted to be a writer you started with short stories, stayed persistent, then after you had a few published and a bit of a reputation you could start working on that novel.
The Wheel of Time sabotaged that route for me. After reading Jordan short stories were insanely difficult. I’d always put in too much description. In a novel, okay, you describe the forest, but in a short story you just have your character walk into it. He ruined my instincts. On top of that, all my ideas were grandiose and broad because — again — that’s what The Wheel of Time was. I could barely get a story to clock in at under 5000 words.
And to this day the short story it the hardest thing about writing for me.
Shaking off Robert Jordan’s influence has been a lifelong process. Reading other authors helps immensely. For example, Orson Scott Card’s work is the opposite of Jordan’s. I just finished The Gate Thief and there is zero description in that book. Not a sunset, not a tree, not a person. It’s just, “Danny went here, Danny met this person, this happened to Danny.”
It’s immensely uplifting to read different authors, to know the goal of writing is to find my own unique voice and style and that I don’t have to be beholden to what established authors do.
But it took me a long time to realize that, and I have Robert Jordan to blame.
As we all know, Mr. Jordan passed before he could finish the series. What he started when I was ten was finished by Brandon Sanderson when I was 33.
The last question I have now is…do I go back and finish it?
I was chatting with a librarian once at the turn of the century. He was this diminutive chap with big friendly eyes. He liked reading the classics. Hesse, Koestler, anything considered meaningful in elite literary circles.
I was trying to expose him to The Wheel of Time. I talked about how exciting and different it was, how detailed and intriguing. He asked me how long it was and when I told him there were six books out with no end in sight he looked positively offended.
“I can’t read that,” he said incredulously. “I’m sixty nine! I have to read the important stuff!”
I’m 41 now and I finally understand what he was saying. Can I go back? Can I invest that kind of time with work and kids and adulthood in the way? Are there more meaningful works I should be reading? Will it take over how I write again, infiltrate my style and process?
I didn’t finish the series, and that fact has always lingered over me. I was so passionate about it, so dedicated to it, before I turned on it and moved on. I often wonder what became of Rand, of Lan and Padan Fain. It’s a loose end that nags at me.
I’m sad that James died. He was a bright light and he changed fantasy forever. The Wheel of Time was a powerful worked that shaped and influenced me when I was at my most impressionable. It was also the catalyst for A Song of Ice and Fire and countless other great works that treated fantasy differently than The Lord of the Rings and The Malloreon.
I just wish I’d found it in my late twenties, not my mid teens when I was so impressionable. And I wish it had ended after four or five books and not fifteen.
But I don’t wish I hadn’t read it, because then I wouldn’t know how powerful and exciting a fantasy novel could be, how one man’s imagination could be so monumental.
The Wheel of Time changed everything, including me. And looking back on it now, I think I owe it to a great visionary and my own piece of mind to finish it, to see the final confrontation and do what I never thought possible while reading The Wheel of Time the first time: see it end.
So I will. And unlike my first attempt, I’ll be better for it. As a person and as a writer.
Rest in peace, James. I miss you.
