One of Jordan's arguable "big mistakes" early on was that when he realized he wanted more breathing room to tell the beginning of the story in the style he was aiming for than any single volume would let him, he took the easy way out and rather than re thinking the whole beginning of his story (for instance by being more discriminating with the episodes he really needed vs. all the ideas he had) he divided his original book 1 into a kind of trilogy, obvioulsy adding "episodes" to get full novels out of his original three acts. It does work more or less in EOTW and TDR but it's largely failing in TGH which has all the defects of an overblown Act 2. The really big mistake, though, was to create three almost identical climaxes out of what was no doubt his original big confrontation with Ishamael that brought things back to the first prologue. And while he was at it, why not triple Egwene's captivity as well and why not triple the revelation of Rand as Dragon Reborn? And so instead of Egwene being captured in act 2, we got Egwene getting captured in act 2 thrice, and we got Rand losing Moiraine thrice and son on etc. That's all coherent enough with Jordan's concept of the Pattern repeating itself in great and small ways, but there are ideas like this that gain from staying in the background and not infect the storytelling itself too much....

Jordan ended up with not one "slower" introductory book that you'd expect in a multi-volume effort, but three. That's at least one too much. It's only with book 4 he started getting into the thick of things and turned to the more historical style he was aiming for since day 1 (so he's claimed anyway).


That's the problem with books 1,2,3 Roberts skirted around a lot and, not having done much research on the series's history, never quite nailed down. Jordan had too much to tell in a single book, but solved this out by splitting it in three books that he then padded - and it shows.