How would George R.R. Martin change his Song of Ice and Fire books? "I'd have them finished"

Author George R.R. Martin published the first book in his Song of Ice and Fire series, A Game of Thrones, back in 1996. He published the most recent book in the series, A Dance With Dragons, in 2011. Fans have been waiting for the follow-up, The Winds of Winter, for over a decade, and there's still no release date. Seven out of eight seasons of Game of Thrones, HBO's adaptation of his books, aired during that span.

What's the holdup? Theories vary, but fans can at least rest assured that Martin appears as fed up with the wait as them. During a talk at the Oxford Writers House, Martin gave an honest answer when asked what he'd change about his books: "If I could change one thing about one of my books, I'd have them finished."

Martin stopped short of explaining why The Winds of Winter is taking so long to write, although he did relay a curious anecdote that at first seems a bit like a non sequitor, but which may hold part of the answer. Martin talks about being part of a writers group in Chicago back in the 1970s when he was starting out. The group had a lot of young writers like him, but also some established authors like Gene Wolfe, who wrote the "four-book trilogy" known as The Book of the New Sun, a science fantasy epic published in the '80s. Martin refers to the books as The Shadow of the Torturer, the title of the first book in the series.

"[T]he thing I always envied about Gene was a very practical thing: Gene, as great as he was, was a part-time writer," Martin recalled. "He had a full-time job as an editor for a technical magazine, Plant Engineering, and they paid him a nice salary...And with that salary he bought his home and he sent his kids through college and he supported his family and then on weekends and nights he wrote his books. And he wrote all four books of the Torturer series before he showed one to anyone. He didn't submit them to an editor, which is the way it usually [happened]. He didn't get a contract and a deadline; he finished all four books. Of course by the time he finished the fourth book (remember it was supposed to be a trilogy), he was able to see the things in the first book that didn't really fit anymore, where the book had drifted away, where it had changed, so he was able to go back and revise the first book, and only when all four were finished did Gene submit the book and the series was bought and published."

"I kind of envied him the freedom to do that. But I knew even then, I was not the editor of Plant Engineering magazine. I had no other salary. I lived entirely on the money that my stories and books earned. To write those four books took him like six years or something. I couldn't take six years off with no income. I would have wound up homeless or something like that. But there is something very liberating from an artistic point of view if you don't have to worry, you know if you happen to inherit a huge trust fund or a castle or something like that and you can write your entire series without having to sell it, without having to worry about deadlines, that's something that that I would envy, but I've never done that, I never could have done it even now. But believe it or not, I am not taking all that time to write Winds of Winter just because I think I'm Gene Wolfe now. I would love to have had it finished years ago, but yeah, that's the big thing I think I would change."

At first blush, I didn't quite see how Martin's wish for the books to have been finished related to this story about an author who got to write all of the books in his series before publishing them, making adjustments to the earlier books as he went. But upon reflection, it makes sense. My main theory for why Martin is taking such a long time to write The Winds of Winter is because he's having trouble keeping track of a series that includes a huge number of plotlines, characters and relationships. At some point, it's very hard to advance a story this complicated in a way that makes sense for everyone. I wonder if Martin looks back and wishes he could adjust some things in the earlier books to make writing the new book easier. Of course he can't, and he feels an obligation to keep his series completely consistent. If only he'd written all of the Song of Ice and Fire books ahead of time, he wouldn't have this problem.

But he didn't and he does, and we are left waiting for his next steps. After The Winds of Winter, Martin has at least one more book planned: A Dream of Spring. But who knows how this tale will grow in the telling, for better or worse?

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