George R.R. Martin explains why he’s “struggling” with The Winds of Winter

A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin rarely gives interviews these days, but when he does, he goes all in. Speaking to The Guardian, Martin talks about everything from Fire and Blood to The Winds of Winter to why people love fantasy stories, scratching an itch fans of his work rarely get to address.

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Let’s start with Fire and Blood, the first of two volumes in Martin’s invented history of the Targaryen dynasty “written” by Archmaester Gyldayn, a “crotchety old guy with strong opinions.” The book comes out November 20, and Martin sounds very excited for people to read it.

"There are novels buried in it. If I were 30 years younger I could easily write a series about the Dance of the Dragons, or I could write the story of Aegon’s conquest. Every one of the 13 children of Jaehaerys and Alysanne has a story that could be told about him or her, their rise, their fall, their triumphs, their deaths … It was a lot of fun to create, a lot of fun to live in that world again."

To clarify, Fire and Blood isn’t a novel in the traditional sense of the word, more like a fake history book, albeit an exciting one. Martin’s model for Fire and Blood is a four-volume history of the Plantagenets by Thomas B. Costain; “old-fashioned history,” as Martin tells it. “[H]e’s not interested in analysing socioeconomic trends or cultural shifts so much as the wars and the assignations and the murders and the plots and the betrayals, all the juicy stuff. Costain did a wonderful job on the Plantagenets so I tried to do that for the Targaryens.”

It sounds like he was successful, at least if these excerpts are any indication. “When the dragons come, your flesh will burn and blister and turn to ash,” says one prophet. “Your wives will dance in gowns of fire, shrieking as they burn, lewd and naked underneath the flames. And you shall see your little children weeping, weeping till their eyes melt and slide like jelly down their faces.” And here’s a bit about one mother’s pain during the Dance of Dragons, the Targaryen civil war that tore the realm apart: “She saw her son rise up against his uncle and die, together with his dragon. A short while later, her second son followed him to the funeral pyre, tortured to death by Tyanna of the Tower.” It’s not The Winds of Winter, but Fire and Blood sounds like a bloody good time.

And it may be all we have for a bit longer, since it sounds like Winds is still giving Martin some trouble. “I’ve been struggling with it for a few years,” he said.

"The Winds of Winter is not so much a novel as a dozen novels, each with a different protagonist, each having a different cast of supporting players and antagonists and allies and lovers around them, and all of these weaving together in an extremely complex fashion. So it’s very, very challenging. Fire and Blood by contrast was very simple. Not that it’s easy, it still took me years to put together, but it is easier."

For the record, this basically aligns with our thoughts on the reason for the long wait for Winds; it’s got less to do with conspiracy theories about Martin losing interest or waiting for the show to finish and more to do with the story he’s chosen to write being very, very complicated.

That said, HBO’s Game of Thrones has made things harder for the author, after a fashion. “The show has achieved such popularity around the world, the books have been so popular and so well reviewed, that every time I sit down I’m very conscious I have to do something great, and trying to do something great is a considerable weight to bear,” Martin said.

"On the other hand, once I really get rolling, I get into the world, and that happened recently with Fire and Blood. I was going to sleep thinking of Aegon and Jaehaerys and waking up thinking of them and I couldn’t wait to get the typewriter. The rest of the world vanishes, and I don’t care what I’m having for dinner or what movies are on or what my email says, who’s mad at me this week because The Winds of Winter isn’t out, all that is gone and I’m just living in the world I’m writing about. But it’s sometimes hard to get to that almost trance state."

Martin talked a lot about this “writer’s trace,” which sounds like the opposite of writer’s block. And it sounds like it’s happened on Winds, too. “[T]here are days when I sit down in the morning with my cup of coffee, I fall through the page and I wake up and it’s dark outside and my coffee is still next to me, it’s ice cold and I’ve just spent the day in Westeros.”

Then there are all the other projects Martin is working on. In addition to putting out Fire and Blood, he’s consulted on HBO’s upcoming Game of Thrones prequel show set during the Age of Heroes, is executive producing an HBO series based on Nnedi Okorafor’s science fiction book Who Fears Death, and is apparently working on “a couple of other shows for HBO that I can’t talk about yet.” (Man, does Martin ever love hinting at stuff he can’t talk about yet.) For better or worse, he’s no longer just a fantasy author; guy is practically a mogul. “It’s all fun, but there are days when I feel a little dizzy. It’s a good problem to have.”

"Like every other young writer I dreamed of fame and fortune. Having achieved them I can tell you that fortune is great. I like the fortune part of it. Fame is definitely a double-edged sword … If I’m in an airport or a big city, any kind of public event, I have to be prepared to be recognized, everybody wants a selfie. The fans are usually very nice but you can’t control it, you can’t turn it off. We all have bad days when we’d just like to be left alone, you don’t get to have that option any more … It’s a mixed blessing, definitely."

Let’s move on to Martin’s influences. Like many fantasy writers, he lived “under the shadow of [Lord of the Rings author J.R.R.] Tolkien,” but he never kid himself that he could write in Tolkien’s voice, and never tried. “He was a very different man than me, a man from a different time with very different attitudes, and even though we were both writing about a medieval-type society I had a very different take on it, on basic attitudes about the war and sexuality, so I was just telling my story.”

"“Tolkien had an enormous influence on me, but after Tolkien there was a dark period in the history of epic fantasy where there were a lot of Tolkien imitations coming out that were terrible. I didn’t necessarily want to be associated with those books, which just seemed to me to be imitating the worst things of Tolkien and not capturing any of the great things."

Martin always had in the back of his head the idea of writing his own epic fantasy story, but waited until inspiration struck “out of nowhere” in 1991. “When I began, I didn’t know what the hell I had,” he remembered. “I thought it might be a short story; it was just this chapter, where they find these direwolf pups. Then I started exploring these families and the world started coming alive. It was all there in my head, I couldn’t not write it. So it wasn’t an entirely rational decision, but writers aren’t entirely rational creatures.”

Rational or not, Martin’s creations have shaped the world of fantasy fiction, and the world of TV. Even unfinished, A Song of Ice and Fire has opened people’s eyes to the power of the kind of story to which Martin has dedicated his career:

"People read fantasy to see the colours again. We live our lives and I think there’s something in us that yearns for something more, more intense experiences. There are men and women out there who live their lives seeking those intense experiences, who go to the bottom of the sea and climb the highest mountains or get shot into space. Only a few people are privileged to live those experiences but I think all of us want to, somewhere in our heart of hearts we don’t want to live the lives of quiet desperation Thoreau spoke about, and fantasy allows us to do those things. Fantasy takes us to amazing places and shows us wonders, and that fulfills a need in the human heart."

You can read the rest of the interview here.

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