Robert Jordan and Character Design

I can’t be objective about the nomination of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time for the Hugo Award for best novel.

I understand folks’ discomfort with the series’ nod, but somewhere in my heart of hearts I’m still the kid who got passed a copy of Eye of the World by a friend in Scouts, burned through the first few books in a month and waited desperately for more.  I read The Shadow Rising in a single day.  My Dad and I spotted the books on Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman’s library shelf during a recorded interview—I read them so often Dad could recognize these books out of focus by the color of their spines—and when I met Thurman in person I asked if he was a fan (he said they belonged to his wife—I wonder if his daughter, Uma Thurman, yes, that Uma Thurman, ever read them?).  I wore out at least two copies of TEotW before my folks decided we should ditch the cover entirely and laminate the first and last pages and binding glue with packing tape.  And while I bailed on the series after Winter’s Heart, I can’t ignore the WoT’s role in my development, alongside other treasures I don’t talk about as much on this site, like the Star Wars EU, Heroes Reborn Iron Man (and the subsequent twenty issues or so, until I lost the plot in some Marvel Uber Crossover Event or other), and the Fantasy Powers League.

Lots of people credit Jordan for the creation of the modern magic system, which may be fair—though I think you have to look a lot earlier than Jordan for that, and anyway his magic system, much as I love it, is a bit smoke and mirrors.  Explain how balefire works with reference to the five-element system, please.  Or Traveling, for that matter.  Or Skimming.  Jordan’s real genius in magic system development (and, I think, the key to making any sort of magic system work) was to present a system that looked complete but fuzzed out enough around the edges to allow speculation, and to let him keep surprising readers without seeming cheap.  But honestly, the magic wasn’t what kept me reading for, gods, 10,000 pages.

The characters did that.

Jordan was shockingly (though unevenly) good at character design.  By that I mean: I haven’t read a Wheel of Time book since college, and I can name—just did, actually, in another window—thirty-three separate Wheel of Time characters without breaking a sweat or reaching for Wikipedia.  Thirty four.  Thirty five.  These characters aren’t just cyphers with names attached, either: almost all of them pass the Plinkett Test.

The Plinkett Test comes from an early scene in the hilarious and cutting Red Letter Media reviews of the Star Wars Prequels, in which kayfabe film reviewer-cum-world’s most horrible human Harry S. Plinkett challenges his friends to describe characters in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace without reference to either (a) physical description or (b) capabilities (like if they can jetski, or do wicked backflips while channeling the True Power or whatever).  His friends, of course, fail miserably for The Phantom Menace—but breeze through the same challenge for characters from Star Wars: A New Hope.

And it’s amazing how many WoT characters pass this same Test: angst-ridden but fundamentally upstanding guy who always wondered what was over the horizon.  Brash, cocky kid out to have a good time in spite of bad circumstances.  Hard worker who would have been perfectly happy staying home.  Bright-eyed but practical and eager for adventure.  Furious, traditional, neurotic, repressed and fundamentally suspicious of the outside world.  Stoic, weather-beaten, determined.  Merry and sly, hiding dark secrets and deep tragedies.  Wise and distant, always a few steps ahead.  I could probably go several layers deep into minor characters without losing those of you in the audience who have read Jordan.

These summaries are simple and evocative—that’s why I said ‘character design’ before, not ‘characterization.’  Character design asks for elemental simplicity; characterization asks for complexity, for the fission and fusion of elements under pressure.  Aaron Diaz of Dresden Codak has a great (and mildly NSFW) post about character design that everyone who writes, especially in genre, should read—he talks about how characters in comics should be distinguishable from one another even on the basic level of their component shapes, and how readers should be able to tell characters apart even while they (the characters, not the readers) are stark naked.

These concerns are just as important for writers as for artists; the shape-level differences in Diaz become differences in voice—both the narrator’s and the character’s.  The recognizable-while-naked angle is another version of the Plinkett Test, repurposed for visual design.  Jordan’s characters endure due to their passage of the Plinkett Test—we could recognize them naked.  (And we’re often asked to.)

Now, look, I’m not claiming Jordan is the Lord King God of All Literature.  It’s been a long time since I last returned to Randland, while I can’t stay away from Damar, or Dunnett’s Scotland, or Zelazny’s worlds.  The design of female WoT characters often gets blurry around the edges, and Jordan tends to repeat himself on a prose level (especially when it comes to character actions used in place of dialogue tags—instead of Marlowe’s cigarettes, Jordan had sniffs and braid pulls and arms crossed under breasts, the last of which I actually used once in Three Parts Dead as a not-so-subtle callout to The Wheel of Time)—and after book 6 the series did start to feel like it spun its wheels one too many times and I’m sure I’d see issues galore if I re-read the books starting with Eye—but…

There’s a reason I devoured these books back in the mists of time.  And it’s a credit to the strength of Jordan’s character design that I feel I could pick up again where I left off in spite of ten years’ interruption, and revisit old friends.