George R.R. Martin is the only person alive who really knows the status of The Winds of Winter, the long-awaited sixth installment in his Song of Ice and Fire series. With “hundreds and hundreds of pages” completed on a manuscript 10 years in the making, it’s a big project…perhaps too big.
Martin has found himself here before. When he was working on the fourth book in his series, A Dance with Dragons, the manuscript ballooned to the point where he and his publishers decided to break it up into two volumes divided by character and location: A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons. Combined, the fourth and firth books have around 1,800 pages.
According to Martin, The Winds of Winter is intended to run around1,500 pages. That’s also a very big book, and we don’t know if Martin might go beyond that. It’s possible that he could split up the book again, and has admitted that some of his publishers have suggested it. “I am resisting that notion,” he wrote in a 2018 blog post.
But might it happen anyway? Let’s take a look at Martin’s progress on Winds and see if we can figure it out.
How many pages of The Winds of Winter has George R.R. Martin completed so far?
In 2010, a year before A Dance with Dragons came out, Martin claimed he was moving five chapters originally planned for that book over to The Winds of Winter. In April 2011, just few months before Dance hit bookstores, he reported moving an additional four chapters over. Chapters in the fourth and fifth books average about 15 pages, so Martin might have started Winds with 100-150 pages of cut material.
Martin said he planned to start writing new material for The Winds of Winter in early 2012. He reported having 200 “really finished” manuscript pages and two hundred “rough” pages. At the premiere of Game of Thrones season 3 in 2013, GRRM told an interviewer that he was about a “quarter of the way done” with the book, which could mean around 350-400 pages. And in November 2014, he reported he was “still in the middle of The Winds of Winter.”
From then out, it was a lot of the same. When interviewed by Access Hollywood in 2015, Martin said that he still had “a lot of pages to write, but he also had a lot of pages written.” At the start of 2016, Martin wrote that Winds would not be done by the time the sixth season of Game of Thrones premiered later that year, and that he was “months away” from finishing. However, he did say that he had “hundreds of manuscript pages complete” at that point.
Jump to 2020 and updates become more frequent. Martin finished three chapters in June of the year, and is reportedly writing about Arya Stark, Cersei Lannister, Barristan Selmy, Tyrion Lannister, Asha Greyjoy and Areo Hotah. He went on to complete three more chapters and make progress on several more in July, but admitted there was “still a long ways to go.”
That’s likely the brutally honest truth. On average, those six chapter may total about 75-100 pages. Based on the scattered updates throughout the decade, we can assume that Martin has a bit more than half of the sixth book “really finished,” maybe 750-1000 finished manuscript pages. But of course, there could be plenty of chapters completed that he didn’t explicitly mention in his updates.
Why is The Winds of Winter taking so long to write?
I’d argue that there are two major reasons for the wait. The first one is that Martin has described himself as approaching writing as a “gardener” rather than an “architect.” Here’s what that means in Martin’s own words:
"Don’t write outlines; I hate outlines. I have a broad sense of where the story is going; I know the end, I know the end of the principal characters, and I know the major turning points and events from the books, the climaxes for each book, but I don’t necessarily know each twist and turn along the way. That’s something I discover in the course of writing and that’s what makes writing enjoyable. I think if I outlined comprehensively and stuck to the outline the actual writing would be boring.-George. R.R. Martin"
Obviously, if he doesn’t plan out his story ahead of time, it’s going to take longer to find.
The next thing that slows Martin down is his willingness to rewrite things. When asked in 2017 if he ever goes back and rewrite things “significantly” after he discovers a plot hole, he replied, “all the time.” And given how complex his story has become, there are a lot of opportunities for holes to appear.
George. R.R. Martin resisted splitting up The Winds of Winter
On his blog in 2016, a fan asked Martin if would ever consider splitting up The Winds of Winter like he did with Feast and Dance, thus allowing the first volume to come out faster. “It would not be my preference,” the author replied. In 2018, a user asked, “has there been any thought of publishing WINDS in similar fashion as FIRE AND BLOOD: in two volumes?” Martin admitted that some of his publishers have suggested he break up the book, but he was “resisting” the idea.
Martin reiterated that he was committed to finishing his books with two more novels — The Winds of Winter and finally A Dream of Spring — in a 2019 blog post. “For what it’s worth, I do not consider A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE to be a series,” he wrote. “It’s one story. A huge complicated story, admittedly, one that will take seven volumes to tell (once I finish the last two).”
George said in February 2021 that he’d written “hundreds and hundreds of pages” ofThe Winds of Winter in 2020, which was his most productive year on the book so far. That’s a good sign, but he still has pages to write. Hopefully we’ll get the full thing, unbroken, before too long.
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