Game of Thrones “doesn’t influence” what George R.R. Martin writes, and other tidbits

A few months back, George R.R. Martin visited Northwestern University, his alma mater, to receive Medill’s Hall of Achievement alumni award. He ended up talking in front of a jam-packed hall of students for over an hour, and touched on a great number of subjects along the way.

The video is long, but well worth it, as Martin drops many of interesting bit of information, both about A Song if Ice and Fire and writing in general.

First, let’s hit the stuff that has some bearing on the future of A Song of Ice and Fire. Just as Game of Thrones seems less and less influenced by the book series, Martin confirmed that the show doesn’t have any influence on his work, at least not directly. “The show doesn’t influence what I write,” he said, “other than adding to my stress.”

As for what might be coming, Martin has a plan, although parts of it are intriguingly undefined. “I know the broad strokes of the story,” he says. “I know the end of most of my characters, but the devil is in the details, and a lot of it I will discover in the course of writing.” This plays into an extended metaphor Martin had about different kinds of writers: he thinks they’re either “architects” or “gardeners.” The latter kind constructs books before the first word is written, while the second plants a seed, “waters it with their blood,” and sees what grows.

Martin classifies himself as more of a gardener, which makes sense. Not long ago, he admitted to going forward with a plot twist involving some character who’d been killed off on the show but remains alive in the novels, a twist that hadn’t occurred to him until relatively recently. That kind of spontaneity may be responsible for why Martin is a self-confessed “slow writer”—if you’re adding in details as you go, you’ll have to accommodate for them—but that’s probably also why his stories have proved so delightfully unpredictable.

Other highlights from the video:

• On his favorite viewpoint character to write: “I love ’em all, but Tyrion is probably my favorite.”

• The first character Martin created was Bran. The idea of a young boy in a medieval setting who watched his father behead someone came to him very vividly, and he wrote the first Bran viewpoint chapter in a few days. The rest of A Song of Ice and Fire grew from there. Finding the direwolves in the snow was also part of his original inspiration.

• On his initial arrival at Northwestern University after a childhood in New York: “Chicago might as well have been Shanghai for all I cared. For me, it was a wild, exotic place.”

• When asked which dead characters he missed writing for or about, he answered “all of them.” Still, he doesn’t think they should be resurrected. Martin is a comic book fan, but doesn’t think the comic book tradition of bringing characters back from the dead has a place in his work.

• Martin talks quite a bit about J.R.R. Tolkien, an author who he admired greatly, but whose work he think inspired a lot of second-rate imitators. “The things that [Tolkien] did very well…in the hands of the Tolkien imitators became negatives in the fantasy field. One of them was this whole idea of evil being an external force, where a whole bunch of really good, nice people in white cloaks get together and fight the really ugly people who are dressed all in black.”

• Martin is more interested in moral relativism: “I’ve always intended my characters to be gray…exploring that is one of the great pleasures of writing or reading fiction,” he said. “We all have the capacity for heroism or villainy.”

• A lifelong science fiction fan, Martin is saddened there most sci-fi stories know take a dim view of the future, with dystopian fiction being in vogue. “For 50 years, science fiction predicted that we would go into space. Almost no one predicted that we would retreat from it. I’m sometimes still astonished by that…We’re looking at the future with trepidation and fear. There’s been a general loss of faith in the world of tomorrow.” However, Martin thinks optimism is catching on in the Chinese literary community, and holds up author Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem as an example. “It represents a real opening-up of Chinese sci-fi to American readers. Science fiction is very popular there, because China is still looking to the future.”

• On Hollywood: “I hate test screenings and focus groups. They get these things in their head about what the audience will like, and it’s wrong, because the audience is unpredictable.” In Hollywood, “nobody knows anything.” He appreciates HBO because it threw out many of the rules Hollywood had previously used to craft shows, including requirements that lead characters must be “likable.” According to Martin, all that matters is that characters be “interesting.”

• On his college studies: “I actually majored in magazines rather than newspapers, because even back then I wasn’t too good at this deadline thing…and the idea of having a daily deadline for newspapers just freaked me the hell out.”