Disappointment over The Winds of Winter Delay Was Inevitable Long Ago
By Ani Bundel
Before George R.R. Martin made his big announcement at the tail end of New Year’s Day, I already knew what it would say. Loss of enormous ten-page post or no, if he was going to announce that The Winds of Winter was going to be released in the next ninety days, he would have put it up for us to wake up to on New Year’s Day. So though I was sad to read it, I was not all that surprised to learn that the book still wasn’t finished, and won’t be out in the near future.
Perhaps it was that lack of surprise that explains why I am not all that upset that The Winds of Winter is not going to be here in time for the Season 6 premiere, and that my fellow book-readers and I will not get all out spoilers for the season from the books ahead of time. I’ve known the chances of George R.R. Martin beating the show to the finish line were impossible before the premiere of Season 4. (For those who might be curious what my reasoning was, I wrote about it here.) There was a chance—a slim chance, but a chance—that he might be able to get The Winds of Winter out before Season 6, but there was just no way he would beat Seasons 7 and/or 8. And with that knowledge, I was able to let go of waiting for the books.
I know there are a lot of angry people out there right now, ready to burn things to the ground over this news. (Hi Razor! *ducks*) But to be honest, I feel sorry for Martin.
We are, after all, taking about a man who has been in denial about the reality of the TV show overtaking him for years. This latest failure to meet his deadline is like the blindfold finally slipping, and an acknowledgement that for millions of people, he won’t get to tell the story first. But this is a problem years in the making, and not all of it should fully be laid at his feet. After all, a writer is an artist. Artists, if they are expected to produce, need management. And it has been clear that whoever manages Martin has been not doing their job long before the TV show was even an idea two guys named Dan Weiss and David Benioff came up with.
Some writers produce under pressure. I fall into this category. If my boss gives me a deadline, I make it. But if he gives me an open-ended “whenever,” it requires me to give myself an internal deadline, and to ignore his protestations that it need not be done by then.
Martin doesn’t seem to fall into this category. When one looks at the release dates of the Song of Ice and Fire novels, it’s striking to see that the one-two-three punch of A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords came out over a five-year period, one book every other year. It’s also interesting to note that he delivered an outline for A Game of Thrones in 1993. That book came out in 1996, so the process from conception to completion took about three years.
When was the one period when Martin could churn out a novel every 18-24 months? The one time when he was writing under contract with no expectations that the book would be a major hit. In other words, when there was no pressure. When did he start to fall down significantly on his release dates? After A Storm of Swords, when the series hit the big time in the fantasy community. At that point, in order to keep producing, he needed an editor who could push him to keep it simple, keep it smart, and for the love of god, not pull a Robert Jordan and start writing 1000+ page novels with main characters missing.* Instead, he was allowed to write something so convolutedly tied up in its own threads that there was no clean way to cut through them, something that the show attempted to grapple with last season. The story that Martin was telling so cleanly in the first three novels is now difficult to extract. My guess is that the real solution to this problem would have been a stronger-willed editor 15 years ago.
I think Martin saw the TV show as a way to pull himself out of the stalled mode he was in after A Feast for Crows, and for a moment it worked, forcing A Dance with Dragons out from under the weight of the stuff he’d buried the story in. But it also backfired, because with the show going in three seasons from “surprise critical darling” to “bonafide hit” to “global phenomenon,” the amount of pressure Martin was under to complete Book 6 was beyond anything that had come before. This is a man who has said from the beginning that he blows deadlines. There was no way he wouldn’t blow this one, not under this type of pressure.
Now that Martin has well and truly failed to get the books out before the TV show catches up to him, I believe that a weight will be lifted off him. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, in September of next year, once Season 6 has come and gone and the think-pieces have dwindled away, Martin suddenly finds writing the end of the book to be startlingly easy, and he’ll be able to get it out in no time.
I also think that seeing Season 6 on screen will help with all those rewrites he keeps talking about. One thing that has become clear to me in the last year or two, as Martin has talked about new plot twists occurring to him that the TV show can no longer do because it’s killed off this or that character, is that he is also writing these novels to be different from the TV show, so that when they are released later, they are not “novelizations of HBO’s Game of Thrones.”
And if I am wrong, and Martin never manages to finish The Winds of Winter, is that really the end of A Song of Ice and Fire? Jordan never finished Wheel of Time. Frank Herbert never finished the Dune saga. Someone (or someones) continued in their stead (Martin doesn’t want this to happen, but also acknowledges that it may be out of his hands). Martin’s got only one life on this planet, and if he wants to take his earnings and travel the world (he never got to do it as a kid, which is part of the reason why he developed worlds in his head) rather than quickly completing his epic, he can.
*I still maintain that, although The Shadow Rising wasn’t the greatest book in the Wheel of Time series, it didn’t fully begin to collapse until The Fires of Heaven, when we went without seeing Perrin for an entire novel.