You sound like my friend speculating ten years ago that he must be writing both of the last two books together because its taking so long. Summer child. He’d publish the book as soon as its done, but it never will be.
He seems to want to continually rewrite them because "I read the chapter and its not very good”, but preston jacobs summed it up after one of their chapters: “It is really hard to write a clever character like Tyrion, and that is what he has stalled on”.
I suspect this is accurate, but I have hope that the Dunk and Egg books are much, much easier to write and the success of this show will drive him to write at least a few more…
Not just the success, but he has actually obviously enjoyed working with someone who is not butchering his story and is mostly sticking to what’s on the page while keeping him heavily involved.
In fairness to show runners, this one is much, much smaller in scale and thus requiring of many fewer compromises for the sake of budget, story, and filming limitations.
Yeah, I don’t even think House of the Dragon is bad or anything, but it is very clear Martin HATES it.
I think this is part of it but AIUI the main problem is that he now just has too many characters spread over too great a distance - the finale of necessity means bringing them all back together so they’re in the right place at the right time with the right experiences behind them, and it’s basically impossible to do that.
The fundamental problem is that while the TV show made most of the kids late teenagers so that they were plausible young adults by the time they were leading armies, freeing slaves etc., in the books they are canonically young teens verging on tweens. The original plan was literally just to jump forward five years but he decided not to do that (i.e. to fill in those years in more or less real time) and now there is Just Too Much that has to happen, people have to cross huge distances to interact, the dragons aren’t fully mature yet etc. etc. The other change the TV show made was to start ignoring travel time, which got them a lot of flack from detail-oriented fans but honestly was the only way to have people show up where they needed to be.
I’m honestly surprised Martin wouldn’t prefer to write some nice neat self-contained Dunk and Egg stories. As it is, he is completely within his rights to decide that sorting out “the Mereneese knot” is incredibly tedious work that he’d frankly rather not do.
You called it. As Martin would say “words are wind”. It has already been reported that Martin has changed his mind. Sometime in mid 2025 Martin started work on “The Village Hero” a Dunk and Egg story in the Riverlands. He isn’t exclusively working on that, however, and has been switching back and forth between it and Winds.
I assume that GRRM was distracted from the slog of writing by the giant stacks of television money and what that can buy.
At this point he’s got way more money than he knows what to do with. He’s opening bars and theaters and wolf reserves and train lines and buying movie props and whatever else he feels like. He already has so much that he can’t figure out what to do with it all.
As a writer, I believe him when he says the writing has just gotten really hard. We’ll see.
I read somewhere that there are a couple of uber-fans of the novels that he uses to check whether he’s contradicting himself, because even he can’t remember everything.
That is true. They helped him write The World of Ice and Fire which was the basis of Blood & Fire. He talks about them in the Afterword of Blood & Fire.
Sorry for bringing this up so late – what did you think of the season? I thought it was fantastic, about as good as it could have possibly been. Presumably it at least exceeded your expectations?
It was better than I thought it would be. The spacefilling was there though, and could have been more taut. i guess the low standards set by GOT post Season 4, and House of Dragon (I watch but don’t… actively dislike) means it doesn’t have high heights to hit. They are doing a lot with the source material and will be interesting to see the second season, with less to work with. Perhaps I’m misremembering the stories and thinking they have less. Making them short episodes and a short season (I envisioned the usual 10 hours of telly) at least made up for it. Could have done without the spitting and shitting though, seemed unnecessary to me.
Thanks!
I am not a writer myself, but I have heard others say that the complexity of a story increases exponentially and not linearly with the number of fully fleshed out primary characters a story has. ie for each new character you don’t just have to come up with their attributes but how they interact with all of the other characters. Ice and Fire has one of the biggest casts of any novel I have ever read. As other of noted not only is the cast large but they are spread over many different locations.
Put me firmly in the camp that Martin has written such a large, complex story that he is having trouble getting it all back together.
Yeah, it’s been obvious since Book 4 that he’s lost control of his own narrative.
You can see what the problem is just from watching the latter seasons of GOT, the TV writers simply started teleporting people and armies around to where they needed to be without any regard to whether it made sense or not. Which is exactly the problem Martin is trying to write himself around.
I personally reckon it’s a lot about having to write Tyrion, the hardest character to write. You probably only got book 4 because it had no Tyrion in it. It is very hard to write an intelligent character like that who knows everything. That and him rewriting things which he is never happy with. And it sounds like he throws it away rather than edits it too. Starts again. Which is an incredibly wasteful process.
Shrug, Martin on more than one occasion, has said Tyrion is his favorite POV character to write. On the other hand, favorite doesn’t equal easy. I can see an argument that, for masters of their craft, writing hard characters is enjoyable precisely because it is difficult to do.
Never mind, apparently, in the process of writing this, I have argued myself into agreeing with your position. laugh.