Fuck. Somebody is going to end up showing him this comment and he's going to decide it's a good idea. I blame you!
There is a Martin quote out there he made before he started writing ASOIAF. Paraphrasing here, but it goes thusly: "If I were a cynical man, I'd start a fantasy series and keep churning out the books until the day I die."
When I come across it again, I'll post it.
As soon as the cameras are off I am going to fuck that little dog.
Fuck. Somebody is going to end up showing him this comment and he's going to decide it's a good idea. I blame you!
There is a Martin quote out there he made before he started writing ASOIAF. Paraphrasing here, but it goes thusly: "If I were a cynical man, I'd start a fantasy series and keep churning out the books until the day I die."
When I come across it again, I'll post it.
It's a story told by Dan Simmons. See this thread here, for the quote and video:
You know what? I don't even think he's as smart as everyone gives him credit for. Not saying he isn't smart, but all those logical points people make, "clues" they find. I have a hard time believing he's carefully crafting his clues and tying up unresolved plot holes...
I think he's actually much smarter and more devious than many give him credit for... with things like Jon Snow's parentage, for instance. And much more grounded than others seem to believe.
It's sorta fascinating to watch what these prolonged waits between books do to his fans. You get some people who write him off as a schmuck for the delays and the disappointments of unresolved storylines. While others start praising him for insanely complex schemes and secret messages in his text that he never intended and could not have dreamed up himself. I've said it before, but I think there's a fascinating case study just waiting to be written up about ASOIAF fandom through the years. Something about social psychology and groupthink in the age of Internet fan forums.
"Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things. Real life seldom structures a decent denouement." - Martin Silenus
I doubly agree! And I think that he covers any other faults he may have through using third person limited narration. After all, if a mistake slips into the story he can then claim it was something a particular POV mistook.
The best "wordcraft" I've seen from GRRM is the first few chapters of AGOT--specifically Catelyn II. There's one passage in there that I felt not only evoked how a Medieval person would speak, but stood out to me as being a bit poetic. That's the chapter that hooked me into wanting to read more, and because of that one moment of "wordcraft" when he got it right:
That brought a bitter twist to Ned's mouth. "Brandon. Yes. Brandon would know what to do. He always did. It was all meant for Brandon. You, Winterfell, everything. He was born to be a King's Hand and a father to queens. I never asked for this cup to pass to me."
"Perhaps not," Catelyn said, "but Brandon is dead, and the cup has passed, and you must drink from it, like it or not."
Ned turned away from her, back to the night. He stood staring out in the darkness, watching the moon and the stars perhaps, or perhaps the sentries on the wall.
It's not the best "wordcraft" but it struck me as apt, appropriate, and slightly beautiful in context of the chapter and its mood. The only other phrase that comes close to it in AGOT is the final chapter's ending words:
As Daenerys Targaryen rose to her feet, her black hissed, pale smoke venting from its mouth and nostrils. The other two pulled away from her breasts and added their voices to the call, translucent wings unfolding and stirring the air, and for the first time in hundreds of years, the night came alive with the music of dragons.
That was of course the best line to end the novel on. There's not a lot of other phrases that strike me as lovely just for their own sake, but in most respects I find AGOT to have some of Martin's best "wordcraft" that I've encountered thus far in my endeavor to read his work. Martin has his moments, but they're few and far between for the large part in his gigantic volumes of words.
I like those passages too...and the last line of ASOS 55 - She just smiled at that. "D'you remember that cave? We should have stayed in that cave. I told you so."
"We'll go back to the cave," he said. "You're not going to die, Ygritte. You're not." "Oh." Ygritte cupped his cheek with her hand. "You know nothing, Jon Snow," she sighed, dying.
For some reason, simplistic 'gotcha' endings just grab me. Like Lonesome Dove: When she left, Wanz couldn’t stand it,” Dillard said.“He sat in her room a month and then he burnt it.” “Who?” Call asked, looking at the ashes. “The woman,” Dillard whispered. “The woman. They say he missed that whore."
Or the most jarring of all, Catch-22's out-of-nowhere demise of a main character that ended a chapter: : And Nately, in the other plane, was killed, too.
Anyway, rambling...but with you on the wordcraft - it occasionally rears its head in ASOIAF, but Martin isn't one I'd put in my Top Ten Best Writers list or anything. Or even Top 50, really.
You know what? I don't even think he's as smart as everyone gives him credit for. Not saying he isn't smart, but all those logical points people make, "clues" they find. I have a hard time believing he's carefully crafting his clues and tying up unresolved plot holes. They're plot holes, people, not intentional hints he plans on revealing later. He needs a fan to fact check his work for goodness sakes.
From what i've gathered on his writing style, he freeforms everything. That is a perfectly acceptable way to draft a story, and it works very well for some writers (Brust works this way as well), but the end effect of this style is you will have to rewrite extensively. The trap that i fall into when following this style of writing is you start editing every scene to get the sentences perfect, and you do not progress the story forward and it stagnates. for this style to work, you have to write beginning, middle, end, and then adjust for overall story arc in your scenes, doing a rewrite. Then you have to edit and rewrite again until the story falls into the accepted beats for good stories (Hero's Journey and screenwriting structure both tend to a standard form). Once that is done, you have to rewrite to foreshadow that which needs hinted at, and setup all of the twists, it is impossible to do that in first drafts, even for Steven King. So, it is a lengthy process, especially when your WPM hovers around 20 (i'm a horrible typist). Another pitfall of this style is the tendency to expand into unnecessary locales because you get excited by this new idea. Next thing you know you've got a freight train of pain chained in dungeons so you can have a character try and fit in with the locals and show some bewbs.
So, freeform writing can directly lead to tangents. which leads to D&E and the world book. love D&E, don't get me wrong, and i'm sure he wrote them to give some parallels in addition to backstory for the TEC, and i've never read the world book except for what has been quoted in forums. However, for someone who admittedly dislikes knowing how things end, once you have drafted or plotted to the end (and i think there is no way he resolved his knot without some sort of point to point outline) motivation is going to wane. After writing an encyclopedia on a fictional world, the last thing i would want to write is a story in that setting. at least for a while (apart from an Alien vs. Predator fan fiction i've thought about writing, i'd only ever write in my world).
Now as an artist, you've done nothing until you finish it. He has enough pride that this will be something he puts at least minimal effort into finishing because it should be his magnum opus. But this is not something that will be finished soon. His initial plan is far out the window (no 5 year gap), and so we're already deep into the rewrites, and now there is so much added pressure to produce work better than everyone else out there (an impossible goal), and you have a prime case of burnout. It becomes work and creativity is stifled.
He is a very talented writer (you do not make a bestseller without being one), but due to the nature of freeform writing, i think much of the clues people find are more of an unconscious creative inspiration than an planned and executed strategy for laying breadcrumbs. i think that once he gets past a few of his current roadblocks and whittles away the scope creep (to me this was a huge issue beginning in book 3 post the Red Wedding. i can't help but notice the complete change in having Cat and Bran fleeing north after the sack of Winterfell and going to the wildlings from the outline letter), he'll start making better progress.
long way of saying gooder writing ain't EZ. (i tried to contain my rant on his writing style, but i really needed to...)
You know what? I don't even think he's as smart as everyone gives him credit for. Not saying he isn't smart, but all those logical points people make, "clues" they find. I have a hard time believing he's carefully crafting his clues and tying up unresolved plot holes. They're plot holes, people, not intentional hints he plans on revealing later. He needs a fan to fact check his work for goodness sakes.
From what i've gathered on his writing style, he freeforms everything. That is a perfectly acceptable way to draft a story, and it works very well for some writers (Brust works this way as well), but the end effect of this style is you will have to rewrite extensively. The trap that i fall into when following this style of writing is you start editing every scene to get the sentences perfect, and you do not progress the story forward and it stagnates. for this style to work, you have to write beginning, middle, end, and then adjust for overall story arc in your scenes, doing a rewrite. Then you have to edit and rewrite again until the story falls into the accepted beats for good stories (Hero's Journey and screenwriting structure both tend to a standard form). Once that is done, you have to rewrite to foreshadow that which needs hinted at, and setup all of the twists, it is impossible to do that in first drafts, even for Steven King. So, it is a lengthy process, especially when your WPM hovers around 20 (i'm a horrible typist). Another pitfall of this style is the tendency to expand into unnecessary locales because you get excited by this new idea. Next thing you know you've got a freight train of pain chained in dungeons so you can have a character try and fit in with the locals and show some bewbs.
So, freeform writing can directly lead to tangents. which leads to D&E and the world book. love D&E, don't get me wrong, and i'm sure he wrote them to give some parallels in addition to backstory for the TEC, and i've never read the world book except for what has been quoted in forums. However, for someone who admittedly dislikes knowing how things end, once you have drafted or plotted to the end (and i think there is no way he resolved his knot without some sort of point to point outline) motivation is going to wane. After writing an encyclopedia on a fictional world, the last thing i would want to write is a story in that setting. at least for a while (apart from an Alien vs. Predator fan fiction i've thought about writing, i'd only ever write in my world).
Now as an artist, you've done nothing until you finish it. He has enough pride that this will be something he puts at least minimal effort into finishing because it should be his magnum opus. But this is not something that will be finished soon. His initial plan is far out the window (no 5 year gap), and so we're already deep into the rewrites, and now there is so much added pressure to produce work better than everyone else out there (an impossible goal), and you have a prime case of burnout. It becomes work and creativity is stifled.
He is a very talented writer (you do not make a bestseller without being one), but due to the nature of freeform writing, i think much of the clues people find are more of an unconscious creative inspiration than an planned and executed strategy for laying breadcrumbs. i think that once he gets past a few of his current roadblocks and whittles away the scope creep (to me this was a huge issue beginning in book 3 post the Red Wedding. i can't help but notice the complete change in having Cat and Bran fleeing north after the sack of Winterfell and going to the wildlings from the outline letter), he'll start making better progress.
long way of saying gooder writing ain't EZ. (i tried to contain my rant on his writing style, but i really needed to...)
GRRM pretty much admitted to this - explicitly - when he pitched aSoIaF to Harper Collins almost 25 years ago. He loses interest when he has to wrap up things. The Big Multi-Volume Epic is not his thing. HC picked it up anyways. Idiots.
So the best of everything GRRM didn't intend or write is contained in the threads on this and the other web sites. I had a suspicion that the folks on here were doing a better job of writing the story than George. Thank you all and I hope the theories etc. continue.
I'm afraid George is tired of this particular series. I recall a statement he made in connection with Roberts' Rebellion, however long ago it was : paraphrase "put away the rulers and stop watches distance doesn't matter or something similar. The answer concerned a question about the length of the rebellion being about a year. Everyone on here knows that's bunk simply because of travel time. So we lived with Martins' laws of physics. Fast forward to ADWD now we get a day by day, mile by mile description of the march from Deepwood Motte to almost Winterfell. How many people died, dead livestock and broken wagons and carts. Why? Because it adds the necessary page count to get to Jon gets the pin cushion treatment and the cliff hangar, Same thing with Dany in the Dothraki travelog after the escape from Meerene. The HBO series has made it even worse, now George is stuck with details. I kind of got the idea from SSMs and interviews that GRRM doesn't like to "count coppers". Now he's in a position where it's necessary and he doesn't like it. Even if three fourths of the show is a direct opposite of what is planned for the novels, it's still more or less a plotted course. The analysis of the first five novels has become microscopic due to boredom waiting for the sixth. That's going to make gotchyas harder. All in all think of the one chore you put off every chance you get because you are not fond of doing it. GRRM and A Song of Ice and Fire. Stuck at five and three quarters.
I'm afraid George is tired of this particular series. I recall a statement he made in connection with Roberts' Rebellion, however long ago it was : paraphrase "put away the rulers and stop watches distance doesn't matter or something similar. The answer concerned a question about the length of the rebellion being about a year. Everyone on here knows that's bunk simply because of travel time. So we lived with Martins' laws of physics. Fast forward to ADWD now we get a day by day, mile by mile description of the march from Deepwood Motte to almost Winterfell. How many people died, dead livestock and broken wagons and carts. Why? Because it adds the necessary page count to get to Jon gets the pin cushion treatment and the cliff hangar, Same thing with Dany in the Dothraki travelog after the escape from Meerene. The HBO series has made it even worse, now George is stuck with details. I kind of got the idea from SSMs and interviews that GRRM doesn't like to "count coppers". Now he's in a position where it's necessary and he doesn't like it. Even if three fourths of the show is a direct opposite of what is planned for the novels, it's still more or less a plotted course. The analysis of the first five novels has become microscopic due to boredom waiting for the sixth. That's going to make gotchyas harder. All in all think of the one chore you put off every chance you get because you are not fond of doing it. GRRM and A Song of Ice and Fire. Stuck at five and three quarters.
When GRRM pimped the cycle to his publisher 25 years ago, he openly admitted that he gets bored when he has start bringing things to a close. We were warned. Well, at least the publisher was.
When GRRM pimped the cycle to his publisher 25 years ago, he openly admitted that he gets bored when he has start bringing things to a close. We were warned. Well, at least the publisher was.
Well he could have at least waited one more novel to get bored, he's got more irons in the fire than a ten ranch round up at this point.