George R.R. Martin talks Lady Stoneheart, finishing A Song of Ice and Fire, and much more

TIME’s Game of Thrones cover story is the gift that keep on giving. Today, it released a rare interview with A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin, where he talked about everything from his writing style, what he wishes wasn’t left out of the show, how much Game of Thrones influences A Song of Ice and Fire, and more.

Let’s start with him revealing the difficult time he had writing the Red Wedding chapters for A Storm of Swords. “I knew the Red Wedding was coming and I’d been planning it all along, but when I came to that chapter, which occurs two-thirds of the way through A Storm of Swords, I found I couldn’t write that chapter,” he said.”

"I skipped over that chapter and wrote the hundreds of pages that followed. The entire book was done, except for the scene with the Red Wedding, and even all the aftermath of the Red Wedding,. It was just so hard to write that scene, because I’d been inhabiting Catelyn for so long, and of course I have a lot of affection for Robb, too, although he was never a viewpoint character, and even for some of the minor characters. They’re minor characters but you develop a relationship to them too, and I knew they all were going to die. It was some of the hardest writing I’ve ever done, but it’s also one of the most powerful scenes I’ve ever done."

Agreed all around. However, as book-readers know, Martin didn’t completely get rid of the Catelyn Stark character after she died. Instead (and there’s a book SPOILER coming up, for all those who avoid such things), Beric Dondarrion resurrected her a “vengeful wight” intent on murdering members of the Frey family.

Martin revealed that the idea for Lady Stoneheart came in a roundabout way from The Lord of the Rings, which he’s read as a kid. It never quite right sat right with Martin that Galdalf reappeared in the second book after dying in the first, none the worse for wear and even more powerful than before. “That’s, in some ways, me talking to Tolkien…’Yeah, if someone comes back from being dead, especially if they suffer a violent, traumatic death, they’re not going to come back as nice as ever,'” Martin said. “That’s what I was trying to do, and am still trying to do, with the Lady Stoneheart character.” Although he also admits that may have just been having a hard time saying a permanent goodbye to Catelyn.

As you may have noticed, Lady Stoneheart never appeared on the show. There’s been debate in the community about whether it was right to cut her, but if Martin had his way, she’d be on the show. “At some points, when [Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss] and I had discussions about what way we should go in, I would always favor sticking with the books, while they would favor making changes,” he said. “I think one of the biggest ones would probably be when they made the decision not to bring Catelyn Stark back as Lady Stoneheart. That was probably the first major diversion of the show from the books and, you know, I argued against that, and David and Dan made that decision.”

"David and Dan made a decision not to go in that direction in their story, pursuing other threads. But both of them are equally valid, I think, because Catelyn Stark is a fictional character and she doesn’t exist. You can tell either story about her."

Martin concedes that, from the very beginning, it was always clear that Benioff and Weiss were going to do “the lion’s share” of work on the show, but as a co-executive-producer, Martin was obviously involved. He helped with the casting early, and wrote one script per year for the first four seasons. “I would have gladly done more, but there just wasn’t time,” he said. “I’m still trying to do these books. It takes me about a month to write a script and I didn’t have a month to spare, so I said, I think I’ll sit out season 5. I’ve sat out seasons 6 and 7 too, just trying to concentrate on this book, which as you know is massively late.”

He also thought that, after he met with Benioff and Weiss some years back and outlined the rest of the plot for them, he didn’t “need to be quite as involved as I was at the beginning.” Still, he’s there “whenever they want to talk to me, and I’m always glad to weigh in.”

So Martin can still influence the series, but does it influence him? By this point, the show has branched out pretty markedly from the source material, and Martin says that won’t affect what he writes, in part because the demands of television and literature are different (HBO has a budget, for example, and he doesn’t), and because he’s been writing this story for too long to change course just because a TV show takes his story in another direction.

"You have to remember that I started writing this story in 1991 and I first met David and Dan in 2007. I was living with these characters and this world for 16 years before we even started working on the show. They’re pretty fixed in my mind and I’m not going to change anything because of the show, or reaction to the show, or what fans think. I’m just still writing the story that I set out to write in the early 1990s."

Still, that doesn’t mean he has the story planned beat for beat in his head. Martin is famous for making parts of it up as he goes along, which could partially account for why he takes so long to write. “In the case of any of my novels, I know where I’m starting from, I know where I want to end up, more or less,” he said. “I know some of the big turning points along the way, the stuff I’m building for, but you discover an awful lot along the way. Characters rise up and seem more important, and you get to what you’d thought was going to be a big turning point and… the thing you’d thought about two years ago doesn’t really work as well, so you have a better idea! There’s always that process of discovery for me. I know not all writers work that way, but it’s always been the way I work.”

The other thing that’s slowed down Martin’s writing process is the mounting pressure to make the book series not just successful, but a fantasy series that will stand the test of time. Martin didn’t always feel that kind of pressure, but as the series got more exposure over the years, it started to build. “Instead of just writing a story, there’s this little guy in the back of my mind saying: ‘No, it has to be great! It has to be great! You’re writing one of the great fantasies of all time! Is that sentence great? Is this decision great?'”

"When I started in 1991, I was just trying to write the best story I could. I didn’t think this will be a landmark thing for all time. The fact that this has gotten all this favorable attention and praise, wonderful reviews, award nominations, it does increase the pressure to do it again."

This could help explain why the first few books in the series came out within years of other, and why the last couple have had five and six-year gaps in between. Still, even when Martin met with Benioff and Weiss to outline the endgame years ago, “I never dreamed that the show would catch up to the books, but it has, so we are where we are now. And hopefully we’re taking two roads to the same destination.”

Still, Martin assures TIME that “I am going to finish these books; I think I have that obligation to the world and my readers. It’s the thing I’m going to be remembered for.” And then, after that, maybe he’ll write short stories for awhile. “I am never going to write again a gigantic seven-book opus that takes 30 years!”

Next: Kit Harington discusses Starkbowl and Jon Snow's true parentage

Martin also talked about another hot-button issue among the Game of Thrones fandom: the depiction of sexual violence. Martin takes issues with critics who say that his story includes too much of it.

"I’m writing a war story, essentially — the Wars of the Roses. The Hundred Years’ War. They have “war” right in the title of each of my inspirations here. And when I read history books, rape is a part of all these wars. There’s never been a war where it wasn’t, and that includes wars that are going on today. It just seems to me that there’s something fundamentally dishonest if you write a war story and you leave that out."

There are individual scenes, however, where things were less clear-cut. Take, for example, Daenerys and Khal Drogo’s first night together. In the books, it reads as a consensual encounter, but isn’t depicted as such on TV. “[W]e had an original pilot where the part of Daenerys was recast, and what we filmed the first time, when Tamzin Merchant was playing the role, it was much more true to the books,” he said. “It was the scene as written in the books. So that got changed between the original pilot and the later pilot. You’d have to talk to David and Dan about that.”

Shifting gears, Martin looked back on the days before Game of Thrones when other Hollywood types courted him to turn A Song of Ice and Fire into a movie, particularly after the Lord of the Rings movies became a success. But it never quite felt right.

"[T]hey couldn’t get a handle on the size of the material, the very thing that I set out to do. I had all these meetings saying, “There’s too many characters, it’s too big — Jon Snow is the central character. We’ll eliminate all the other characters and we’ll make it about Jon Snow.” Or “Daenerys is the central character. We’ll eliminate everyone else and make the movie about Daenerys.” And I turned down all those deals."

The story wouldn’t work on network television, either, “because there’s too much sex, there’s too much violence, it’s too complex. These characters were not likable enough. You can’t put incest on [a network].” It had to be premium cable, and that’s just what happened.

Lastly, Martin made some interesting comments about Beric Dondarrion, the original living dead character.

"His memories are fading, he’s got all these scars, he’s becoming more and more physically hideous, because he’s not a living human being anymore. His heart isn’t beating, his blood isn’t flowing in his veins, he’s a wight, but a wight animated by fire instead of by ice, now we’re getting back to the whole fire and ice thing."

Dondarrion is long dead in the books, but is still kicking on the show. We’ll see how he deals with that when it returns this Sunday.