When the book published in 2011 introduces additional characters with claims to the throne, it dawned on me that he didn’t actually know where he was going.
While the writing was still good, he had clearly wandered into the same morass of being unable to drive the plot towards resolution, much like how books 8-11 (over 2400 pages!) of the Wheel of Time featured a grand total of one major plot milestone and a whole lot of events that I barely remembered and that were largely irrelevant to the final events in the last two books of the series that had to be finished by Brandon Sanderson because, love him or hate him, Sanderson knows how to advance a plot in a mostly coherent fashion.
2 huge problems are how young many main characters are and that all the published books cover only a year of the half. GoT viewers might miss the point that at the beginning of the ASOIAF Dany and Jon are 14 and Arya is 9 and they barely get any older in the books.
GRRM was planning a 5 year time skip in the original trilogy but he failed to achieve it so now he is stuck with an 10 years old girl who is supposed to kill the NIght King.
As someone who has read most of the stuff GRRM wrote I think he is seriously overrated.
I lost hope somewhere around 2009. Then Dragons came out and it became clear Martin just continued to dig his hole deepest and deeper. When HBO was announced, I hope for a bit a that it would force him to wrap up the writing but the poor slop just keeps coming up with excuses. Very sad. Cannot even recommend his books to anyone because they are unfinished.
>Stephen King: “George we're going to have to wrap this up pretty soon. Is there anything that you've always wanted to ask me? Because George, I will.”
I'd love to see the context - what went right before that - because without it that reads like a confession - he says he will answer without saying it because he knows what George should be asking and he also knows that he won't give the answer so he assuages himself that he will give the answer.
The rambling, branching image you give for George R.R. Martin’s approach resembles a tabletop RPG. The dungeon master (author) simply gives the rules and some general plot dynamics of the module before letting the players (characters) full reign on what they wish to do. It makes for interesting stories that feel multilayered and organic with even the DM not knowing quite where it will take them.
However, I think Martin has had too much time away from his players to recreate how they’d behave. You mention the trips and subsequent loss of momentum. I would add that these breaks interrupt his closeness to his characters and the intimate feeling of their way of life/strategies. He’s lost the table and is grasping at ghosts of players who haven’t been for a tabletop session in years. Now he dreads it and wishes to cash in.
I've had a project get sidelined for a lengthy time once. When I came back to it, I didn't even know my characters anymore, their ambitions and underlining motivations were completely gone with only whispers left in certain actions. I tried to force it along with no success. At a certain point there was no saving it and it was easier to just start over again. However, George R.R. Martin is so incredibly deep within this series there is no reset. The published work must stand, and he must figure out what is happening before he can return. Sadly, that line of thought is likely long gone and nearly impossible to resurface.
Did Cook finish The Black Company series? I was waiting for the next one way back in middle school, in the early Bush Jr years. Maybe it was a case that he finished it, and then decided he wanted to keep going. Anyway your point stands, he let it get out of hand and he needs a coauthor to help him steer the ship home.
George has a couple of problems. One he is legit old his success came to late in life. He is at retirement age.
2nd the story is a mess, many of the characters are to young, but most importantly too many characters in general. So many viewpoints all interwoven the story became a Gordian knot. Lord of the rings something George hoped to surpass has only basically 9 characters with a central plot with a fundamental simple good vs evil story. It’s too complex and George knows it so to maintain some of his legacy he is going to abandon the main books. That’s why he is focusing on other projects.
George RR Martin clearly doesn’t understand gardening, nor writing. No gardener I know EVER lets anything grow unchecked, curated or ‘wild’. Gardeners, even ‘organic’ ones or with an aesthetic preference for ‘natural’ gardens are ruthlessly driven by aesthetics or economic necessity to shape nature into something fruitful (in the broadest sense of the term), productive and beautiful. Gardeners are ALWAYS weeding, watering, feeding, conditioning the soil, pruning, shaping and, yes, moving or removing plants that aren’t happy or working with the desired vision. Be that a formal French garden or the strict naturalism of Japanese gardens.
George RR Martin is an average writer with an unhealthy obsession with food and loose women who dressed it all up in costumes, got lucky and WAAAY in over his head.
Practical discipline of writing would help, but not fix the fundamental literary incongruence identified with the genre, nor his immaturity. The fact that Tolkien was not published till much later in his life and was able to produce one of the best and most loved trilogy of all time is not a correlation.
Disagree. They were decent enough as a book to film adaptation, but failed on two levels. Those movies ruined Frodo Baggins as a hero. Elijah wood sucked and completely misunderstood the character, playing a weak, neurotic and effete that is nothing like the books. And then those endings sucked because they did not include the scourging of the shire. The missed the critical part of the hero journey for Frodo and the other hobbits. Peter Jackson did a decent job distilling the essential hero arc out of the books, but he really sold Frodo and the Shire short and missed Tolkein’s entire meditation on the nature of good and evil. What Peter Jackson did was the equivalent of leaving out the resurrection of Christ and skipped straight to the Ascension, neither the crucifixion or the Ascension make sense without the Resurrection.
Excellent. You nail it. I also find Conan’s explanation unconvincing. Martin is a terribly undisciplined man, and his gardening style, though it has its benefits, is untenable for a story that Martin has allowed to grow this large. He has probably produced and discarded thousands of pages of good writing because he didn’t like where the plot led. He is incapable of creating a structure and a plan and executing it; he is too stubborn to change his ways, which are basically “come up with the broad strokes and just start writing and see where it goes.” Brienne chapters produced some memorable scenes, but were ultimately unnecessary to complete this story. It’s as if he started to create a playground, and then stopped to wander around it, instead of finishing its construction. Undisciplined. Incapable of changing. Sad. And it’s particularly sad because the story and its ending are relatively reactionary.
Great post!! IMO, all novels are the writer writing about him/herself. They’re highly autobiographical no matter how buried. Unfinished work is not an issue with writing. It’s spiritual. Martin is a deeply unhappy person and finishing his work would only solidify that fact.
I employ the gardening approach, but for some reason, this results in me finishing characters and subplots as fast as I gain them. From feedback, my newest novel, The Domes of Calrathia, leaves the reader longing for more.
As much as I understand laziness and sloth, it's despair that haunts my writing. The reason I can't do 5,000 words a day is because I simply don't want to. I can't stomach it knowing only a handful will read it, and it won't solve any of my personal life problems. Wish I was in George R.R. Martin's circumstances.
Anyways, would love for you to look at my newest novel. If interested, hit me up. Will send you a free pdf.
5,000 words per day is a crazy number btw. I've done that in a single session when I was in the zone, and almost all of that was high quality, but never more than one or two days in a row. Stephen King writes 2,000 words per day and I think that's as much as anyone should aim at. 730,000 words per year is more than enough to accomplish any goal a writer might be chasing. That's more than 4 million words in 6 years, an entire career worth of production. More than 3,000 words per day and you start to just get inferior quality, unless you are cutting 30-40% during the editing phase.
When the book published in 2011 introduces additional characters with claims to the throne, it dawned on me that he didn’t actually know where he was going.
While the writing was still good, he had clearly wandered into the same morass of being unable to drive the plot towards resolution, much like how books 8-11 (over 2400 pages!) of the Wheel of Time featured a grand total of one major plot milestone and a whole lot of events that I barely remembered and that were largely irrelevant to the final events in the last two books of the series that had to be finished by Brandon Sanderson because, love him or hate him, Sanderson knows how to advance a plot in a mostly coherent fashion.
2 huge problems are how young many main characters are and that all the published books cover only a year of the half. GoT viewers might miss the point that at the beginning of the ASOIAF Dany and Jon are 14 and Arya is 9 and they barely get any older in the books.
GRRM was planning a 5 year time skip in the original trilogy but he failed to achieve it so now he is stuck with an 10 years old girl who is supposed to kill the NIght King.
As someone who has read most of the stuff GRRM wrote I think he is seriously overrated.
Excellent points yes. I think he’s great tho
The Dedication in the last book of Larry Correia’s EPIC fantasy.
kek
I lost hope somewhere around 2009. Then Dragons came out and it became clear Martin just continued to dig his hole deepest and deeper. When HBO was announced, I hope for a bit a that it would force him to wrap up the writing but the poor slop just keeps coming up with excuses. Very sad. Cannot even recommend his books to anyone because they are unfinished.
>Stephen King: “George we're going to have to wrap this up pretty soon. Is there anything that you've always wanted to ask me? Because George, I will.”
I'd love to see the context - what went right before that - because without it that reads like a confession - he says he will answer without saying it because he knows what George should be asking and he also knows that he won't give the answer so he assuages himself that he will give the answer.
Maybe in context it's less sinister
No it was just a casual friendly segue by Stephen King.
Here at 50-51 minutes is where it starts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_PBqSPNTfg
Oh wow, in context Stephen King is making a "you can ask me to marry you and I'll say yes" joke
I didn't pick up on that. Not sure if I missed it, you could be right.
I thought the joke was that Stephen King raised his vocal tone in an odd funny way by going mildly high-pitched, nothing deeper than that, but idk.
The rambling, branching image you give for George R.R. Martin’s approach resembles a tabletop RPG. The dungeon master (author) simply gives the rules and some general plot dynamics of the module before letting the players (characters) full reign on what they wish to do. It makes for interesting stories that feel multilayered and organic with even the DM not knowing quite where it will take them.
However, I think Martin has had too much time away from his players to recreate how they’d behave. You mention the trips and subsequent loss of momentum. I would add that these breaks interrupt his closeness to his characters and the intimate feeling of their way of life/strategies. He’s lost the table and is grasping at ghosts of players who haven’t been for a tabletop session in years. Now he dreads it and wishes to cash in.
I've had a project get sidelined for a lengthy time once. When I came back to it, I didn't even know my characters anymore, their ambitions and underlining motivations were completely gone with only whispers left in certain actions. I tried to force it along with no success. At a certain point there was no saving it and it was easier to just start over again. However, George R.R. Martin is so incredibly deep within this series there is no reset. The published work must stand, and he must figure out what is happening before he can return. Sadly, that line of thought is likely long gone and nearly impossible to resurface.
Did Cook finish The Black Company series? I was waiting for the next one way back in middle school, in the early Bush Jr years. Maybe it was a case that he finished it, and then decided he wanted to keep going. Anyway your point stands, he let it get out of hand and he needs a coauthor to help him steer the ship home.
yes Soldiers Live (2000)
I have been waiting for A Pitiless Rain for 25 years. Just checked the wikipedia and it seems he's got new books coming out in Nov. 2025 and 2026
oh my bad
George has a couple of problems. One he is legit old his success came to late in life. He is at retirement age.
2nd the story is a mess, many of the characters are to young, but most importantly too many characters in general. So many viewpoints all interwoven the story became a Gordian knot. Lord of the rings something George hoped to surpass has only basically 9 characters with a central plot with a fundamental simple good vs evil story. It’s too complex and George knows it so to maintain some of his legacy he is going to abandon the main books. That’s why he is focusing on other projects.
Nor will Rothfuss.
George RR Martin clearly doesn’t understand gardening, nor writing. No gardener I know EVER lets anything grow unchecked, curated or ‘wild’. Gardeners, even ‘organic’ ones or with an aesthetic preference for ‘natural’ gardens are ruthlessly driven by aesthetics or economic necessity to shape nature into something fruitful (in the broadest sense of the term), productive and beautiful. Gardeners are ALWAYS weeding, watering, feeding, conditioning the soil, pruning, shaping and, yes, moving or removing plants that aren’t happy or working with the desired vision. Be that a formal French garden or the strict naturalism of Japanese gardens.
George RR Martin is an average writer with an unhealthy obsession with food and loose women who dressed it all up in costumes, got lucky and WAAAY in over his head.
Practical discipline of writing would help, but not fix the fundamental literary incongruence identified with the genre, nor his immaturity. The fact that Tolkien was not published till much later in his life and was able to produce one of the best and most loved trilogy of all time is not a correlation.
It's the first time in history the movie was way, way better than the book, even if the ending sucked.
Not the first time in history. There's a reason nobody ever says that if you liked The Godfather (the movie) you should read the book.
I love The Godfather by Mario Puzo, it’s a great novel
Disagree. They were decent enough as a book to film adaptation, but failed on two levels. Those movies ruined Frodo Baggins as a hero. Elijah wood sucked and completely misunderstood the character, playing a weak, neurotic and effete that is nothing like the books. And then those endings sucked because they did not include the scourging of the shire. The missed the critical part of the hero journey for Frodo and the other hobbits. Peter Jackson did a decent job distilling the essential hero arc out of the books, but he really sold Frodo and the Shire short and missed Tolkein’s entire meditation on the nature of good and evil. What Peter Jackson did was the equivalent of leaving out the resurrection of Christ and skipped straight to the Ascension, neither the crucifixion or the Ascension make sense without the Resurrection.
Lack of integrity by Martin
Excellent. You nail it. I also find Conan’s explanation unconvincing. Martin is a terribly undisciplined man, and his gardening style, though it has its benefits, is untenable for a story that Martin has allowed to grow this large. He has probably produced and discarded thousands of pages of good writing because he didn’t like where the plot led. He is incapable of creating a structure and a plan and executing it; he is too stubborn to change his ways, which are basically “come up with the broad strokes and just start writing and see where it goes.” Brienne chapters produced some memorable scenes, but were ultimately unnecessary to complete this story. It’s as if he started to create a playground, and then stopped to wander around it, instead of finishing its construction. Undisciplined. Incapable of changing. Sad. And it’s particularly sad because the story and its ending are relatively reactionary.
Great post!! IMO, all novels are the writer writing about him/herself. They’re highly autobiographical no matter how buried. Unfinished work is not an issue with writing. It’s spiritual. Martin is a deeply unhappy person and finishing his work would only solidify that fact.
How do you know he’s deeply unhappy?
He says so on his blog
That’s crazy to me and also very sad
thanks, very kind
I employ the gardening approach, but for some reason, this results in me finishing characters and subplots as fast as I gain them. From feedback, my newest novel, The Domes of Calrathia, leaves the reader longing for more.
As much as I understand laziness and sloth, it's despair that haunts my writing. The reason I can't do 5,000 words a day is because I simply don't want to. I can't stomach it knowing only a handful will read it, and it won't solve any of my personal life problems. Wish I was in George R.R. Martin's circumstances.
Anyways, would love for you to look at my newest novel. If interested, hit me up. Will send you a free pdf.
5,000 words per day is a crazy number btw. I've done that in a single session when I was in the zone, and almost all of that was high quality, but never more than one or two days in a row. Stephen King writes 2,000 words per day and I think that's as much as anyone should aim at. 730,000 words per year is more than enough to accomplish any goal a writer might be chasing. That's more than 4 million words in 6 years, an entire career worth of production. More than 3,000 words per day and you start to just get inferior quality, unless you are cutting 30-40% during the editing phase.
Funny you bring up Dune, because there is absolutely no way that Honored Matres space Grandma/Grandpa plot could end in a satisfactory way.
😆