George R.R. Martin explains why he takes so long to write
George R.R. Martin has a lot of irons in the fire. He’s credited as a co-creator on House of the Dragon, he’s an executive producer the upcoming HBO fantasy drama Who Fears Death, and of course, he’s writing The Winds of Winter, the sixth book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series.
To be clear, writing Winds is far and away his first priority. Martin talked about managing fan expectations, among other things, with Greta Johnsen on the Nerdette Podcast. Give it a listen below, and then we’ll hit the highlights.
On how much time he spends writing The Winds of Winter:
“That’s an interesting question, and it really varies and it depends on what I’m doing,” Martin said. “But when I’m actively writing, when it’s really going well — and it doesn’t always go well by any means, there are good days and bad days, there are good months and bad months — but when it’s going well, I live in Westeros.”
"I fall through the computer. I wake up thinking of, you know, Tyrion and Arya or Aegon the Conqueror, whoever I’m writing about, and I go to sleep at night thinking about them. When I’m driving around, I think about them. And it just fills my life."
Aegon the Conqueror is still alive and will be in The Winds of Winter, confirmed!
Kidding. Martin isn’t like most writers, he says. Distractions slow him down, and he’s got plenty of those. “[I]n order to achieve this almost Zen state of obsession, I have to push away real life,” he said. “There are other writers who write four pages a day, they write in hotels, they write on airplanes, they write everywhere. I’ve never been one of those writers. I need to have the whole day just to write, nothing else on my calendar.”
"And it’s an odd irony that the very success of Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire — the popularity of these books has made it harder for me to write these books because the number of interruptions and distractions and other things have increased, doubled and tripled and increased tenfold and a hundredfold."
LOS ANGELES, CA – SEPTEMBER 17: Writer George R. R. Martin attends the 70th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards at Microsoft Theater on September 17, 2018 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Rich Polk/Getty Images for IMDb)
On managing fan expectations:
“I don’t think I do manage them,” Martin said. “I’ve learned to live with them. At a certain point, I gave up trying to manage fan expectations. I just said, well you know, ‘I’m writing it. It’ll be done when it’s done.’ Some days I have good days and I write five, six pages. That’s a great day for me. Some days I struggle and barely get half a page done. Some days I go in and I look at what I wrote last week and say, ‘This is all terrible!’ And I rip it up and start all over again.”
Please, George, stop ripping up pages! Sincerely, everyone.
Image: Amazon
On other fantasy shows
Martin also talked about other fantasy dramas coming to television in the wake of Game of Thrones, stuff like His Dark Materials on HBO, The Witcher on Netflix, and The Wheel of Time and Lord of the Rings on Amazon. “If one or two of them succeed, television will be transformed,” he said. “Then I think fantasy will become a genre of television, just like cop shows and lawyer shows.”
"The danger, of course, is that, if all of these shows fail for one reason or another, then I think television, which is run by success, will back off from fantasy, and say, ‘Oh no, Game of Thrones was a freakish, one of a kind occurrence. And it can’t be duplicated so we won’t do it anymore.’ And obviously I don’t want that to happen."
On his favorite characters
“Tyrion Lannister is certainly a character that I’ve always loved writing,” Martin said, being sure to praising Peter Dinklage’s portrayal of the character on Game of Thrones. “But also the kids were marvelous. I mean, Maisie Williams as Arya and Sophie Turner as Sansa and Isaac [Hempstead Wright] as Bran, they were incredible.”
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In other Martin news, the author was recently inducted into the New Jersy Hall of Fame, sharing the honor with celebrities like rocker Jon Bon Jovi and Seinfeld star Jason Alexander. Congrats, George, you more than earned it.
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h/t Variety