Why is The Winds of Winter taking so long to write?

Fans of A Song of and Fire and Game of Thrones have been waiting for The Winds of Winter for 11 years. What’s the holdup? Let’s get into it.

Recently, Spanish-language Game of Thrones fansite Los Siete Reinos featured a terrific article breaking down the parallels and differences between the waits for the fifth and sixth books in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series — that’s A Dance with Dragons, published in 2011, and The Winds of Winter, for which we are still waiting, respectively. Many, many fans have wondered why, after the first three books in the series (A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords) were published in relatively rapid succession (1996, 1998, and 2000), the latter three have been so much slower in coming. There’s no one answer to that question — Martin himself detailed many of the factors involved — but with Los Siete Reinos as a guide, it’s one worth looking at in more detail.

So the first three novels in the series came out two years apart. A Feast for Crows, the fourth , came out five years later, in 2005. The follow-up, A Dance With Dragons, hit six years after that in 2011. We’re coming up on seven years since the publication date of Dance, and Winds is still nowhere to be seen. It looks like the wait times are getting longer.

One possible contributing factor: Martin devoting times to Game of Thrones and other projects rather than A Song of Ice and Fire. In addition to writing the novels on which it’s based, Martin is an executive producer on the HBO show. He wrote scripts for the first four seasons, had a cameo in the unaired pilot, and contributed to behind-the-scenes features on the home video releases.

Martin was involved with the show while it was development, too, between the releases of Feast and Dance. He met with showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss in 2006, sold the TV rights to HBO in 2007, and thereafter visited the set, was involved in the casting process, and helped make other production decisions. All of this would have pulled him away from the old DOS computer on which he does his writing. And I’d venture that the distractions got worse, not better, after the show premiered and Martin achieved a level of celebrity he hadn’t had before. For example, he revealed that tidbit about the DOS computer on TV to Conan O’Brien, who likely wouldn’t have interviewed him if Game of Thrones hadn’t become a hit.

As the show went on, Martin pulled back to focus more on Winds, foregoing writing episode scripts after season 4 and limiting his public appearances. But the time gone was still time gone.

And even if Martin made an effort to prune the number of projects he’s involved with, demand for his talents has risen. According to him, he is (or was) involved to some degree in all five of the Game of Thrones prequel shows currently in development, and has taken part in “very exciting” meetings with HBO.

But honestly, I think this factor probably had a relatively small effect on the long wait time for Winds. After all, the wait between books started to inflate with A Feast for Crows, which was published before Martin ever met Benioff and Weiss. Rather, the extended periods between books likely have more to do with the growing complexity of the story itself.

So many characters, so much time

The Song of Ice and Fire novels are told from the points of view of its characters, with a different one narrating each chapter. In A Game of Thrones, there were eight point-of-view characters*, and excepting Daenerys Targaryen, every single one of them is gathered at the same place — Winterfell — in the early stretches.

By the end of A Storm of Swords, everything has changed. The number of POV characters has risen from eight to 10, with most of them scattered across the map. Near the beginning of A Game of Thrones, Martin could give us an idea of what was happening with Arya, Sansa, Tyrion, Jon Snow, Ned Stark and more with just one chapter told from one character’s perspective. But with everyone spread out, that became impossible.

And things were about to get more complicated still. After exploring and abandoning the idea of having a five-year in-world gap between the third and fourth books, Martin decided to write two books featuring the stories of different characters running parallel to each other chronologically. Although released separately, A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons are really one huge book — call it A Feast with Dragons. Treated as one novel, the POV character count jumps from 10 to a whopping 22.

By the sound of it, managing that large a cast that spread out slowed down the writing process. Martin spent a lot of time trying to untangle what he called the “Meereenese knot,” a convergence of characters and plotlines on the city of Meereen. Tyrion Lannister was on his way there, Quentyn Martell was on his way there, Victarion Greyjoy was on his way there, there was a plague, Daenerys got married, etc. “All of these things were balls I had thrown up into the air, and they’re all linked and chronologically entwined,” he told Asshai.com in 2012.

"The return of Drogon to the city was something I explored as happening at different times. For example, I wrote three different versions of Quentyn [Martell]’s arrival at Meereen: one where he arrived long before Dany’s marriage, one where he arrived much later, and one where he arrived just the day before the marriage (which is how it ended up being in the novel). And I had to write all three versions to be able to compare and see how these different arrival points affected the stories of the other characters. Including the story of a character who actually hasn’t arrived yet."

Because of the complex nature of the narrative, Martin was writing multiple versions of the same events. Obviously, this would slacken the pace of his writing. Perhaps detailed outlines could have cut down on that time, but Martin has long said that, as a writer, he’s more of a gardener than an architect, preferring to discover parts of the story as he goes rather than planning them all out ahead of time, so outlines were never in the cards.

That brings us to The Winds of Winter, which should include most of the POV characters from Feast and Dance. Here’s our reckoning of who will show up in Winds:

Confirmed to be POV characters

• Alayne (Sansa Stark)
• Areo Hotah
• Arianne Martell
• Asha Grejoy
• Barristan Selmy
• Cersei Lannister
• The Forsaken (Aeron Greyjoy)
• Melisandre
• Mercy (Arya Stark)
• Theon Greyjoy
• Tyrion Lannister
• Victarion Greyjoy

Strong hints they’ll be POV characters

• Bran Stark
• Davos Seaworth
• Deanerys Targaryen
• Jon Connington

C’mon, how could they not be POV characters?

• Brienne of Tarth
• Jaime Lannister
• Jon Snow
• Samwell Tarly

So that’s potentially 20 POV characters in The Winds of Winter, many of whom are still on their own plot tracks. In Game of Thrones seasons 6 and 7, we saw many of these characters unite or meet for the first time. While the show and books have diverged to a significant degree, we can still expect a coming together of characters, and that could mean complications for Martin. The Meereenese Knot is all but untied. What about the Winterfell Knot? Or the Dragonstone Knot? As with Quentyn Martell’s arrival in Meereen, has Martin written different versions of these events to see which one works best, and if so, how much has that slowed him down?

Speaking about his writing in 2014, Martin suggested one way around this: kill more characters.

"The way my books are structured, everyone was together, then they all went their separate ways and the story deltas out like that, and now it’s getting to the point where the story is beginning to delta back in, and the viewpoint characters are occasionally meeting up with each other now and being in the same point at the same time, which gives me a lot more flexibility for killing people."

That’s all well and good, but the long wait for The Winds of Winter suggests that it hasn’t been a panacea for these problems.

Los Siete Reinos reckons that the bulk of Winds is already finished — it’s the ending that’s the problem. LSR points to Martin’s admission that, at one point, he was optimistic that he could finish the book by the end of October 2015. (“That seemed very do-able to me.”) Even with his track record of inaccurately forecasting his own writing speed, LSR figures Martin wouldn’t have said that if he didn’t have a decent chunk of the manuscript complete. (And remember that a good number of advance chapters from Winds were excerpted from the end of A Dance With Dragons once it became clear that Dance would be too long to publish, so Martin had a head-start of sorts with Winds.)

But Martin also once thought that A Dance with Dragons would be released within a year of A Feast for Crows — he even wrote an afterword to that effect and put in at the end of first editions of Feast, so he was confident enough to put his hope in print. Again, the bulk of Dance was probably done by the time he wrote that afterword. Then came the Meereenese Knot, and Dance languished for years while Martin puzzled out how to untie it.

Now it’s possible we’re in a similar situation, only Martin has to deal with a multitude of knots and increased demands on his time.

Or that’s my read on it. In the meantime, we’ll keep watching and waiting and hoping.

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h/t Westeros.org

*I’m not counting Prologue or Epilogue characters in any of these sums