Every time there’s some news about what George R.R. Martin has been up to, I audibly groan and throw a tantrum about him doing everything under the Sun but writing The Winds of Winter. A Song of Ice and Fire has been an incomplete tune for far too long.
Here’s another big problem that few have anticipated: GRRM might just complete The Winds of Winter after all. The real challenge is going to be to get him to finish A Dream of Spring next. Can you imagine there’s another one we have to wait for!?
It has been 13 years since A Dance With Dragons was released in July 2013. Book fans are usually a smug lot every time something they’ve read gets adapted for the screen. We knew what was going to happen to Ned Stark. We knew the Red Wedding was coming. We know that all the Stark children are wargs, something the show fans never found out. But we had to stop gloating years ago, because David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’ Game of Thrones flew ahead of the books and didn’t stick the landing.
In fact, that’s something most readers believe is holding GRRM from completing his ASOIAF series. He might have had a better way of bringing us to the ending where Bran Stark ends up on the Iron Throne. But with everyone cringing over that end, what would be his motivation to even finish the series now? If I were the writer, I’d have severe writer’s block from being torn between giving my readers an ending I know they’re going to hate, or changing it up altogether, which would mean compromising with the story I wanted to tell in the first place. As a writer, It’s not a position I’d wish upon my worst nemesis!
But when Martin was faced with the question on what he would change from his books if he could, the answer was a more logistical one: He’d have them all finished already. The Oxford Writers’ House hosted the Fire & Blood author for a talk earlier this month, and Martin used the example of sci-fi fantasy writer Gene Wolfe, who was often called the “Melville of science fiction.”
Martin talked about how, when Wolfe was working on his The Book of the New Sun series, he finished writing the entire story—four books—before he showed the first novel to an editor and got it published. This helped him greatly because he knew the whole story, and could go back and streamline anything in the first novel that didn’t fit in with the end of his story.
GRRM wishes it was something he too could do, because writing a long and heavy series like ASOIAF was sure to make him constantly want to edit parts of it that were no longer in sync with where the story was going. So, while there are likely individual things about the books that he’d change, what he’d really want to change is whether he had the freedom to do so.
“That’s something that I would envy, but I’ve never done that and I never could’ve done it, even now. Believe it or not, I am not taking all that time to write Winds of Winter just because I think I’m Gene Wolfe now. I would’ve loved to have it finished years ago, but yeah, that’s the big thing I think I would change.“
– George R.R. Martin
GRRM also pointed out how Wolfe was able to do this—keep writing for a whole six years before getting the first novel published. He had a full-time job as an editor of a technical magazine that paid him well enough to sustain his family. And then, he would work on his book on weekends. For GRRM and other writers like him, this was not feasible because writing stories was their sole source of income.
In the same conversation, the writer also mentioned how he found it easiest to write for Tyrion Lannister but hardest to write for eight-year-old Bran Stark because of his age. With these two being pivotal to the ending (or at least the show’s ending), it’s easy to picture the difficulty of trying to stick the landing.
For the number of times I face writer’s block in a week at work, I can only assume what it must be like for someone like him, with all that pressure mounting and fans clamoring for the books’ release! Okay, Martin, at last, you and I understand each other!
Published: Aug 27, 2024 12:15 pm