George R.R. Martin answers our toughest Song of Ice and Fire questionsS




Are there scenes in the Song of Ice and Fire series that you dreamed up 20 years ago, that you're finally writing? Moments you were excited to get to at last?

Yeah. I didn't know at first, in '91 — I didn't know quite what I had yet. I didn't even know whether it was a novel or a novella, or something, at first. So I sort of found that out. But by the summer of '91, you know, it just came to me out of nowhere, and I started writing it and following where it led. But by the end of that summer I knew I had a big series. Initially, I thought it was a trilogy, but it's grown beyond that. But the size is different, and I've introduced some other elements to the books, but it's still the same characters, the '91 characters.


It was quite at the end, it was by '95 that I realized it had to be more than a trilogy, because I had 1,500 pages of manuscript [and] I wasn't anywhere close to the end of the first book. So I said, "I know I can't get all this into three books here. I'm gonna have to break this first book into two books to get it all done." Which required a certain amount of restructuring, but I went back and I did that, I took out about 300 pages or so, and that became the beginning of the second book. And I moved things around.

You've had these characters and places for 22 years, and that's a long time to live with a particular set of characters. So have you lost interest in any of those characters during that time?



There you run into a Sherlock Holmes, Reichenbach Falls sort of thing, where [the writer says], "I'm sick of Sherlock Holmes, I never want to write any more stories about him."

But I haven't even [finished a single story.] As many books as it is, as many words as it is, it's still one story. One story that's not finished yet. I want to finish telling that story. And then I'll worry about that.

You actually said once that you don't enjoy writing, you enjoy having written.


Boy, there are days where I get up and say "Where the hell did my talent go? Look at this crap that I'm producing here. This is terrible. Look, I wrote this yesterday. I hate this, I hate this." And I can see a scene in my head, and when I try to get it down in words on paper, the words are clunky, the scene is not coming across right. So frustrating. And there are days where it keeps flowing. Open the floodgates, and there it is. Pages and pages coming. Where the hell does this all come from? I don't know.

I had, very early in my career, even before I was a professional writer — I'm going back now to my fanzine days in the 60s and 70s — I was very prone to starting stories and never finishing. I'd have some great idea and I would start a story, and I'd write a few pages, five pages, ten pages, and it would never be as good as when it was in my head. It was this incredible thing, [and then] I put it on paper it and it was never as good as I imagined it to be. Then I'd think of some other idea, and I'd go, "Yeah, that one would be really magical." And I'd put aside the half-finished one.


One of the big breakthroughs, I think for me, was reading Robert A. Heinlein's four rules of writing, one of which was, "You must finish what you write." I never had any problem with the first one, "You must write" — I was writing since I was a kid. But I never finished what writing. [I realized], "I gotta actually finish these stories. It does me no good to have this drawer full of fragments." And always be chasing the next idea, which is so much better, so much more beautiful, so much more entrancing then the idea that you're actually working on.

So, I started finishing things. And I'm bound and determined to finish Ice and Fire.

So people have this idea that back when Ice and Fire started as a trilogy, you had an outline where there was a single line that went, "And meanwhile, nobles squabble over power in Westeros." And that single line turned into the middle three or four books of the series. Is there any truth to that?

It's a grotesque exaggeration — but there's at least a nugget of truth to it, yeah. You introduce characters, and sometimes they take on a life of their own.

Some major characters — yes, I always had plans, what Tyrion's arc was gonna be through this, what Arya's arc was gonna be through this, what Jon Snow's arc is gonna be. I knew what the principal deaths were gonna be, and when they were coming. That would be the closest thing.

But there would be some secondary characters, like Bronn, Tyrion's henchman, [who] became a such a popular character. He came out of nowhere. [I was thinking], "Okay, Tyrion has meets these two sellswords, Bronn and Chiggen. And one's going to fight for him. Which one is it gonna be? Okay, we'll go with Bronn." But as I wrote about him, he developed a personality of his own. And his past is super-mysterious, you don't know where he's born from, where he comes from, but he's fun to write about. He comes into a scene — once he's been cast in the TV show, they have a wonderful actor playing him — and he becomes real.


She is, she's incredible.

Do you now think about what she's going to do with the material you're writing now, as an actor?


There was no 'seducing Theon' scene.

No. And, with Margaery — my Margaery is younger than Loras, not older than Loras. So she's really just like a sixteen year old kid. And Natalie is brilliant, but she's clearly not a sixteen year old kid. She's very smart. She's almost what my Margaery will become in ten years.




It's possible. They haven't gotten to that. I know they're, we're bringing in Oberyn this year, there's been that huge Internet controversy about that. So that we will definitely have the Red Viper and his brother Doran at some point. And I think we will have Areo and the Sand Snakes. I don't know. I wrote these books, never dreaming they would filmed or made. It was almost a reaction to my tenure in Hollywood. "I'm just going to do this as big as I want."




But when I actually got into writing them, the events have a certain momentum. So you write a chapter and then in your next chapter, it can't be six months later, because something's going to happen the next day. So you have to write what happens the next day, and then you have to write what happens the week after that. And the news gets to some other place.

And pretty soon, you've written hundreds of pages and a week has passed, instead of the six months, or the year that you wanted to pass. So you end a book, and you've had a tremendous amount of events — but they've taken place over a short time frame, and the eight-year-old kid is still eight years old.

So that really took hold of me for the first three books. When it became apparent that that had taken hold of me, I came up with the idea of the five year gap. "Time is not passing here as I want it to pass, so I will jump forward five years in time." And I will come back to these characters when they're a little more grown up. And that is what I tried to do when I started writing Feast for Crows. So [the gap] would have come after A Storm of Swords and before Feast for Crows.


Other characters, it didn’t work at all. I'm writing the Cersei chapters in King's Landing, and saying, "Well yeah, in five years, six different guys have served as Hand and there was this conspiracy four years ago, and this thing happened three years ago." And I'm presenting all of this in flashbacks, and that wasn't working. The other alternative was [that] nothing happened in those six years, which seemed anticlimactic. The Jon Snow stuff was even worse, because at the end of Storm he gets elected Lord Commander. I'm picking up there, and writing 'Well five years ago, I was elected Lord Commander. Nothing much has happened since then, but now things are starting to happen again." I finally, after a year, said, "I can't make this work."



So, like another five years of Fall?



Dance with Dragons and Feast for Crows. Some of it is in there. Some of it, I've reworked. A version of it is in there, but not the same version is in there. Some of it is just out. It just didn't work.




Well no — some of the storylines from Feast for Crows. I get complaints sometimes that nothing happens — but they're defining "nothing," I think, differently than I am. I don't think it all has to be battles and sword fights and assassinations. Character development and [people] changing is good, and there are some tough things in there that I think a lot of writers skip over. I'm glad I didn't skip over these things.


And that has been interesting, you know. Jon Snow as Lord Commander. Dany as Queen struggling with rule. So many books don't do that. There is a sense when you're writing something in high fantasy, you're in a dialogue with all the other high fantasy writers that have written. And there is always this presumption that if you are a good man, you will be a good king. [Like] Tolkien — in Return of the King, Aragorn comes back and becomes king, and then "he ruled wisely for three hundred years." Okay, fine. It is easy to write that sentence, “He ruled wisely”.



So let's talk about the internet controversy about Oberyn Martell. Do you have any thoughts on that?

I commented on my blog. You can find a more studied response there. I made a couple of comments as to what people said about that. I always pictured Oberyn Martell in my head as a — what I call a Mediterranean type. I know people attacked me for that by saying "He's ignorant, he doesn't know that Africa is on the Mediterranean." No, I know Africa is on the Mediterranean. But in common parlance, when you say Mediterranean you are thinking Greek, Italian, Spanish. When you are thinking Moroccan or Tunisian that’s North African. That’s the way people talk about that.


Some people have written me some very heartfelt letters, and I've tried to respond to them about how they wanted to see someone who looked like them in the books, and how they were [disappointed]. They had pictures of the Martells looking like them, and they were disappointed.

I understand that, but it still wasn't my intent to make... Even the terminology here is such a land mine. I don't even know what words to use here "black" or "African." I used African at one point, sort of like African American. [But] if you use "African" you are guilty for saying all Africans are the same.

I don't know. I am drawing from history, even though its fantasy. I've read a lot of history, The War of the Roses, The Hundred Years War. The World back then was very diverse. Culturally it was perhaps more diverse then our world, but travel was very difficult back then. So even though there might have been many different races and ethnicities and peoples, they didn't necessarily mix a great deal. I'm drawing largely on medieval England, medieval Scotland, to some extent medieval France. There was an occasional person of color, but certainly not in any great numbers.

And meanwhile, you've got Daenerys visiting more Eurasian and Middle Eastern cultures.

And that has generated its controversy too. I answer that one to in my blog. I know some of the people who are coming at this from a political or racial angle just seem to completely disregard the logistics of the thing here. I talk about what's in the books. The books are what I write. What I’m responsible for.




It's probably actually less in Morocco, since you don't have to pay quite the same rate. If you're giving 800 Moroccans 40 bucks each, you're not going to fly in 100 Irishmen just to balance the racial background here. We had enough trouble meeting our budget anyway.



I haven't had a Dothraki viewpoint character though.

I guess it's too late to introduce one now.


Are they barbaric? Yeah, but the Mongols were, too. Genghis Khan — I just saw an interesting movie about Ghengis Khan, recently. I've read books about Genghis Khan, and he's one of history’s more fascinating, charismatic characters. The Mongols became very sophisticated at certain points, but they were certainly not sophisticated when they started out, and even at the height of their sophistication they were fond of doing things like giant piles of heads. "Surrender your city to me, or we will come in and kill all the men, rape all the women and make a giant pile of heads." They did that a few times, and other cities said, "Surrender is good. We'll surrender. We'll pay the taxes. No pile of heads, please.”



Because ravens are like the Internet of Westeros.















And of course, that's what happened to Sliders. They didn't go to a world where the Roman empire never fell, or any of these worlds — they went to a lot of worlds where, "Gosh, it's just like our world, except that Pete Best is still in the Beatles." So the costumes were the same and the cars were the same. I know they had a big thing — in one world, the traffic lights were different, [so] red means go and green means stop. And that was the big difference.

And, you know, I sneer at that, because it's bad science fiction and it's stupid. You don't want to do an alternate-world show, if that's the best you can do. But we might have been forced to do the exact same thing, simply because of budgetary reasons. And then I would have had this show, that would have been a bad show, on my resume. So maybe I dodged a bullet there, by not having it picked up.

That being said, we had a terrific cast. I think our writing would have been better. Our characters were very much better. But we still would have faced the same limits of budget and storytelling. What I was trying to do at that time was say to the network, "We have to do arcs. That's the only way we can make this work. They have to go to Roman world, and they have to stay there for six episodes. You can't do a world a week. They have to stay, because then we can amortize the costumes and the architecture." You have to build sets and have Greek architecture for Roman world, or Arabian Nights world, or whatever world they're going to. But the networks don't like to do arcs, especially back in the 90s. Now they're more open to them. But back then, they wanted strictly episodic shows, where you could run them in any order. You always return to the original [status at the end of each episode].

What's going on with the Wildcards movie?

Melinda Snodgrass is the scriptwriter on that. She's turned in two drafts. And last I heard, they were talking to directors. So we have to get a director to sign on, and that hopefully will go.

Interview transcribed by Katharine Trendacosta and Amanda Yesilbas.


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