George R.R. Martin gives his thoughts on death in fiction

Long before he became a best-selling novelist, George R.R. Martin was submitting stories to fanzines and, eventually, short story magazines. Galaxy’s Edge, an online, bi-monthly magazine that takes its cues from the kinds of publications Martin used to submit his work to, published an interview with Martin in its May 2016 issue, which is free to read online.

The interview, which is conducted by writer Joy Ward, is wide-ranging. Martin’s meatiest comments involve how he approaches death in his work, but he also talks about the details of his long career as a writer. Even at “nine or ten,” it seems he was thinking about the less savory aspects of his work:

"When I was a little kid I used to make up stories about my toys and write them down…I had a collection of space men…I gave them all names and I decided they were a gang of space pirates. This guy was the brains of the operation and here was this lieutenant. This guy was in charge of torture. There’s a little guy there who’s holding a weird weapon that looked to me like a drill so I said “Oh, this guy must be in charge of torture,” because he drills people with that little drill."

He also clarified his opinion of fanfiction, which he’s gone on record as disapproving of.

"Sometimes I get criticized by fans who don’t understand and say, “You say you wrote fan fiction and now you’re against fan fiction.” What I wrote was not fan fiction like that term is used today. Today when people say fan fiction, they talk about taking my characters or Robin Hobb’s characters or Robert Jordan’s characters or Kirk or Spock or any characters from a television show or movie and writing stories about them. Writing stories about someone else’s characters. I never did that and I never approved of that.I did write what we called fan fiction. In the sixties it was simply fiction written by fans and published in fanzines. They were original stories about original characters. Yeah, some of them were pretty derivative. You could sort of look through the thin layer of cloth there and see, wow, this is Batman, even though they’ve changed his name to Kookaburraman."

Finally, he sounded off on how he treats death in fiction. Game of Thrones, and by extension A Song of Ice and Fire, has become known for its willingness to kill off prominent characters. It’s kind of become the story’s trademark, and Martin has some well-developed thoughts on it.

"I think a writer, even a fantasy writer, has an obligation to tell the truth and the truth is, as we say in Game of Thrones, all men must die. Particularly if you’re writing about war, which is certainly a central subject in Game of Thrones…You can’t write about war and violence without having death. If you want to be honest it should affect your main characters. We’ve all read this story a million times when a bunch of heroes set out on adventure and it’s the hero and his best friend and his girlfriend and they go through amazing hair-raising adventures and none of them die. The only ones who die are extras.That’s such a cheat. It doesn’t happen that way. They go into battle and their best friend dies or they get horribly wounded. They lose their leg or death comes at them unexpectedly.Death is so arbitrary. It’s always there. It’s coming for all of us. We’re all going to die. I’m going to die. You’re going to die. Mortality is at the soul of all this stuff…Once you’ve accepted that you have to include death then you should be honest about death and indicate it can strike down anybody at any time. You don’t get to live forever just because you are a cute kid or the hero’s best friend or the hero. Sometimes the hero dies, at least in my books.I love all my characters so it’s always hard to kill them but I know it has to be done. I tend to think I don’t kill them. The other characters kill ‘em. I shift off all blame from myself."

You can read the rest of the interview at Galaxy’s Edge.

h/t The Guardian