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George R.R. Martin continues to sing a magical tale of ice and fire

By Tasha Robinson

rom a distance, George Raymond Richard Martin's writing career looks like a series of discrete mini-careers. Beginning in the early 1970s, he earned a reputation as a sharp, creative short-story writer, racking up three Hugos, two Nebulas, a World Fantasy Award and a Bram Stoker Award, all for his short fiction. He wrote a handful of novels, starting with 1977's brilliant Dying of the Light, before moving to the West Coast to work in television and film. He served as a writer on the new Twilight Zone revival, the executive producer of Doorways (which he's described as "Sliders, except good") and the script editor of the Beauty and the Beast television series. At the same time, he edited the monumental shared-world series Wild Cards, which ran to 15 linked novels over eight years.

But few would dispute that his most monumental achievement to date has been the groundbreaking A Song of Ice and Fire historical fantasy series. Initially conceived as a trilogy, A Song of Ice and Fire rapidly expanded during the writing process; it's currently projected as a series of six massive volumes. An excerpt from the first volume, A Game of Thrones, was published in 1996 as a stand-alone novella and won Martin his fourth Hugo; the second book, A Clash of Kings, was published in 1999 to huge acclaim. The third volume, A Song of Swords, came out this Halloween and promptly debuted at no. 12 on the New York Times bestseller list. Martin's magnum opus, a convoluted and intense series that leaps among many different character perspectives in describing the political clashes between noble families in a proto-medieval world, has gained his old writings new attention; currently, most of his pre-Song books are out of print, but Martin reports that Bantam will soon be reprinting his solo novels, and new Wild Cards books may soon be on the way.

Why do you use the "R.R." in your byline?

Martin: A writer's name is his trademark. It's the thing the reader has to remember to seek out your work again, and it has to be memorable. George Martin is a very common name; there are a number of other George Martins who write, there are a number of George Martins in other fields. The "R.R." makes it distinctive, and people seldom forget it.

You say often in interviews that Tyrion Lannister is the easiest Song character for you to write, and that he's personally your favorite character, if you were forced to pick one. What about him particularly is appealing to you?

Martin: There's a number of things. I think his wit is appealing. He gets off a lot of good iconoclastic, cynical one-liners, and those are fun to write. He's also a very gray character. All my characters are gray to a greater or lesser extent, but Tyrion is perhaps the deepest shade of gray, with the black and white in him most thoroughly mixed, and I find that very appealing. I've always liked gray characters more than black-and-white characters.

You tend to write protagonists with strongly negative personality quirks, people who certainly don't fit the standard mold of a hero. People like Tuf in the Tuf Voyaging series, and Stannis and Tyrion in Song of Ice and Fire. Do you deliberately inject your characters with unattractive elements to make readers consciously think about whether they like them and why?

Martin: [Laughs.] Well, I don't know that I'd choose the word "unappealing," but I look for ways to make my characters real and to make them human, characters who have good and bad, noble and selfish, well-mixed in their natures. Yes, I do certainly want people to think about the characters, and not just react with a knee-jerk. I read too much fiction myself in which you encounter characters who are very stereotyped. They're heroic-hero and dastardly-villain, and they're completely black or completely white. And that's boring, so far as I'm concerned. It's also unreal. If you look at real human history, even the darkest villains had some good things about them. Perhaps they were courageous, or perhaps they were occasionally compassionate to an enemy. Even our greatest heroes had weaknesses and flaws.

If Tyrion's the easiest character to write, who's the hardest?

Martin: Thus far I'd say the hardest character has definitely been Bran, on two counts. Number one, he is the youngest of the major viewpoint characters, and kids are difficult to write about. I think the younger they are, the more difficult. Also, he is the character most deeply involved in magic, and the handling of magic and sorcery and the whole supernatural aspect of the books is something I'm trying to be very careful with. So I have to watch that fairly sharply. All of which makes Bran's chapters tricky to write. It should be easier in the next book, I would think, with the five-year break. Then I'll have a 14-year-old, and in terms of the Seven Kingdoms, that's almost an adult.

The series uses magic in some very unusual ways, as the supernatural element becomes stronger with each book. Is this pattern going to continue?

Martin: The amount of magic certainly is going to increase, yes, and that's been part of my design from the first. However, I think even by the end, it's still not going to have as much overt magic as many of the other fantasies out there.

There seem to be two different styles competing throughout the series: historical fantasy in the Seven Kingdoms series, and a softer Roger Zelazny/Arabian Nights style for the scenes abroad. Is there a conscious split between the two for you, or is it just an aspect of the setting?

Martin: I try to vary the style to fit each of the characters. Each character should have his or her own internal voice, since we're inside their heads. But certainly the setting has great impact. Dany is moving through exotic realms that are perhaps stranger to us than Westeros, which is more based in the medieval history with which we're more familiar in the West, so perhaps those chapters seem more colorful and fanciful.

You focus quite a bit on the mundane details of medieval life, which makes it sound like you've done a lot of research into the subject.

Martin: I've read as much as I can about medieval history and medieval life, into specific areas--clothing, food, feasting, tournaments. All of these particular areas. Rather than look up a specific point when I need it, I prefer to use the research process of total immersion, and kind of soak up as much about the period as I possibly can, so it'll come across when I'm writing about it, that sense of verisimilitude.

Have medieval times and the Arthuriad always been an interest of yours, or did that develop out of your work on these books?

Martin: Writing the books has certainly heightened it, but I've always been interested in history, in other times and places and in the medieval period, which I think is a colorful one.

Heraldry certainly seems to be a personal obsession.

Martin: Ah, yeah, I have to admit I enjoy the heraldry a lot. There's a wonderful Web site which has been done by two fans of mine from Sweden, the Westeros Web site, which includes pages and pages of heraldry of all the houses of the Seven Kingdoms. Not just the major houses, but some of the lesser, minor houses, other knights and minor lordlings as well. I've helped work with the fans who are doing that--they send me the shields for approval, and I send them suggestions. We have something like 400 shields up there now. It's been a real kick to do that.

Are there any sourcebooks you'd particularly recommend on medieval life or heraldry?

Martin: There are some great books. Unfortunately, I'm doing this from a hotel room in Los Angeles and all my books are in Santa Fe. I don't have any titles to hand. There are some great books on heraldry, and I think the best ones to find are the ones that are heavily illustrated, because heraldry is something that's very difficult to talk about in the abstract. It's nice to have the illustrations, and it's nice to have full color, so you can really see the shields and symbols they're doing. One set of books I think is really useful is the Osprey series. Osprey is a house that caters primarily to people who are interested in military history, in gaming and miniatures and that sort of thing. They've done a wonderful series of trade paperbacks that feature full-color plates and color interior drawings about famous battles and warriors and campaigns all throughout history. They have a lot of very useful information in their books on things like the battle of Agincourt, and the battle of Cr�cy, the campaign that led up to the Horns of Hattin. They have a heraldry book that's introductory, but it's still very nice.

What's the writing process like? Do you write the individual chapters in the order they appear in the books?

Martin: Oh, no. [Laughs.] I start off trying to do that, and I certainly outline what order I want the chapters in, but both of those things are subject to change. I usually wind up rearranging the chapters two dozen times before the book is done, trying to get the optimal arrangement of intercutting from one character to another to maximize the suspense. Sometimes there's a certain irony, or a certain interesting point-counterpoint effect you can get by properly ordering certain chapters, juxtaposing events with each other. But you also have the chronology to worry about. It's tricky, and I'm always changing my mind on that, trying to optimize it. As for writing the chapters, well, particularly when a work is going well--if I'm writing a Tyrion chapter and I finish it, but it's really rolling, and I know exactly what's going to follow, then instead of whatever chapter comes next, I'll just go on ahead and write the next Tyrion chapter, even though it may not occur until seven chapters later in the book. I may write three or four before I finally hit the point where I'm struggling a little, and then I'll go back and pick up whatever character was supposed to be next, and write about them for a little while.

How do you keep track of all the details? There are so many minor characters, lesser houses, lists of names--how do you remember who's where, and what their banners and relationships are?

Martin: I do have certain lists and charts that I have to hand, but most of it I just need to remember. It's locked in my head. And it is a lot to keep in mind, there's no doubt about it. I do make mistakes from time to time, and when I do, the fans are quick to let me know about it. I have some very sharp readers. Obviously I try not to do that very often.

Your fans are also very emotionally involved in your work. What aspect of your writing do you think hits people's emotional triggers?

Martin: Well, I think it's the characters. To the extent that I've been able to make the characters real, people invest in them emotionally, they identify with them, and they like or dislike other of the characters. They argue about them--I find that very gratifying. It's one of the things that suggests to me that what I'm doing with the characters is working. When I hear from different fans who have varying opinions about a character, about who's a good guy and who's a bad guy, and who they'd like to live and who they'd like to die--it's not always the expected ones, and they disagree sharply with each other. That's a good sign. In real life, people don't always like the same people. People make moral judgments that differ sharply with each other--witness some of the arguments we see going on about the current election. People should respond to fictional characters in the same way. If you introduce a character who everybody loves, or who everybody hates, that's probably a sign that that character's a little too one-dimensional, because in real life there's no one that everybody loves, and there's no one that everybody hates.

I suspect another reason is that one of your strongest themes is the nature of justice. You often place your characters in very unjust situations, and I think readers react strongly to that. Do you personally get emotionally involved in the lives of your characters?

Martin: Very much so. Especially when I'm writing them. To write these characters as such, I have to become them. I have to put on my Tyrion hat for a while, get inside his head and feel things as he would feel them, and see his choices as he would see them. Then I take that hat off and put on another one. And there are some dreadful things that happen in some of my books to some of the characters, and sometimes those chapters are very, very difficult to write. I know what I have to do because the plot demands it, and because as the story unfolds, that is what would happen at that point. But actually putting the words on paper has a finality to it, and when something really dreadful happens--I find myself drawing back from the abyss sometimes, writing other chapters instead, wasting time playing computer games, because I know I've got a very difficult task to do, particularly if it's a character I've learned to love. But I do it eventually.

You do tend to be very brutal to your characters.

Martin: Well, yes. But you know, I think there's a requirement, even in fantasy--it comes from a realm of the imagination and is based on fanciful worlds, but there's still a necessity to tell the truth, to try to reflect some true things about the world we live in. There's an inherent dishonesty to the sort of fantasy that too many people have done, where there's a giant war that rips the world apart, but no one that we know is ever really seriously inconvenienced by this. You see the devastated villages where unnamed peasants have lived, and they're all dead, but the heroes just breeze through, killing people at every hand, surviving those dire situations. There's a falsehood to that that troubles me. A writer can choose not to write about war. You don't have to write about war if that's not a subject that interests you, or you find it too brutal. But if you are going to write about war, I think you need to tell the truth about it, and the truth is that people die, and people die in ugly ways, and even some of the good guys die, even people who are loved.

Die, or get gang-raped, in many cases in Song of Ice and Fire. Sex and sexuality have a very central and intense place in your books, which is less common in fantasy and historical fantasy than the kind of realistic violence you're talking about.

Martin: Well, a lot of what I just said about that is also true on this subject. If you investigate the real Middle Ages, one of the most interesting things about the period is the contrasts. The whole concept of chivalry on the one hand, and these incredibly brutal wars that they fought on the other hand. And yet both concepts existed side by side. The same thing is true of sexuality. The traditional tenets of chivalry put women on a pedestal, and some of the knights might make poems to their ladies or wear their favors in tournaments, in this kind of gallantry, and yet armies would think nothing of raping every woman they got hold of, in some of these more brutal battles. The Hundred Years' War, for example. Sexuality, once again, I think it's an important driving force in life. It motivates most of the things we do, and it's one of the root things that defines who we are. And yet you find it strangely missing from fantasy, even from some very good fantasy. I admire J.R.R. Tolkien vastly, I think all modern fantasy derives from Tolkien, and Lord of the Rings is one of the great works of this century. Nonetheless, it does have flaws, and I think its almost complete absence of women, and of anything even approaching sex and/or romantic love--it reflects its time and its place, but it's certainly not something I wanted to do.

Speaking of brutality, your practice of ending your books on cliffhangers is somewhat brutal to your audience, particularly with two years' wait between the books.

Martin: [Laughs.] I'm not entirely sure I agree with the characterization that I end the books on cliffhangers. Remember, in these books I'm juggling seven or eight or nine storylines. So when I'm choosing where to end the book, essentially I'm not picking one ending so much as I'm picking eight endings, because I have to see where I'm going to leave each of the characters. And what I've been mostly trying to do is to find a place where there's some sense of closure for most of those characters, where some portion of their story has been told, something has been resolved, an important transition has been gone through. But I do usually include at least one of the eight that ends on something that is an out-and-out cliffhanger. And maybe occasionally more than that. But certainly I don't end all eight on cliffhangers. As to the reason for cliffhangers, it's the same as the reason for cliffhangers always is, to make sure the reader comes back for the next book.

What's the timeline like for publication of the rest of the series?

Martin: It all depends on how long it takes me to write it. They're big books, they take me a year and a half, at least, to write, and sometimes I go over those deadlines, though obviously I try not to. So unfortunately, I think we're looking at 18 months to two years for each volume, and that means we're looking for the next three books, and the ultimate end of the series, in five or six years.

Storm of Swords was the first book in the series so far that contained a seemingly crucial scene that couldn't appear "on stage" because there was no POV character present--the confrontation between Ser Loras and Brienne of Tarth over Renly. When you reach a situation like that, do you consider introducing a new point-of-view character, or using a character that only appears once, or do you try to rearrange the plot so that kind of situation won't come up?

Martin: Those point-of-view characters that I use just once tend to have a very short life span. I've so far restricted them to the prologue and epilogue. It's tricky, because when I do a point-of-view character, I don't like to put them in simply to be a pair of eyes. If I'm going to have a point-of-view character, I want to tell a story about them. Each of the viewpoints in the series has a story. It may be a story that ends in death and tragedy, in some cases it may be a story that ends in triumph and happiness, but it will be a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end, and what we call in Hollywood a character arc. I used to write screenplays and teleplays, and people would always use that term--a series of events that changes the character in some way or another. But I don't like just sticking in, as some writers do, a new character so he can see someone doing something because I have no other pair of eyes there. That kind of character is convenient, but really has no character arc. You have no place to go, you have no story to tell about that character, he's just an observer to someone else's story.

Has your time in Hollywood affected your prose writing in any other ways?

Martin: Oh, certainly. All the writing you do changes you as a writer, and I think I'm a different writer coming out of Hollywood than I was going in. I think I have a better sense of structure and a better ear for dialogue. Both of these are important skills in writing screenplays, and they're something I honed for 10 years. So I think that's one of the things I gained by my screenwriting experience.

Do you ever miss writing for film and TV?

Martin: Sometimes. There were certainly aspects of it that were enjoyable. Working with some good people, and doing a show like Beauty and the Beast that means so much to millions of viewers, having an audience that size, that's all very exciting. But on the other hand, there are drawbacks too. The whole politics of Hollywood, the fights for creative control, always trying to protect your vision against someone who may be very bright and very talented themselves, but has a different view of what you're doing. So I'm not at all unhappy to be back in books. Books were always my first love, and I'm sure books will be my last love.

Is it true that you started your writing career by writing monster stories for neighborhood kids?

Martin: Why yes, that is true. Back in the projects, in Bayonne, New Jersey, I would write in block printing in those old black-and-white marbled notebooks, I would write out these monster stories by hand and sell them to the other kids for a nickel. A nickel was a lot of money in those days; you could get a Milky Way, with two nickels you could get a comic book. So I'd sell the stories and give a dramatic reading of the stories as well, because my audience didn't actually read that well. That was fun.

How was the market for those stories? Did you have regular customers?

Martin: It was good. I did well until one of the kids started getting nightmares from my stories. And his mother came to my mother, and that was the end of my first professional career. Don't give nightmares to the neighborhood kids.

You've been writing a long time, but isn't it still a big jump between those short stories and your current thousand-page novels?

Martin: I think short stories are an excellent way to begin. The magazines are wonderful markets for new writers. They're always looking for new writers, and you can make a name for yourself in a magazine, as indeed I did, publishing a ton of short stories in the early '70s before publishing my first novel in 1977. By the time it had come out, I had won a Hugo, I had a reputation from those short stories, so it was not just another novel being thrown out there with all the other first novels, to sink or swim. It was "the long-awaited first novel," and that makes a very big difference in a career. So I still urge young writers, or aspiring writers, to begin with short stories. A novel may pay more initially, but if your concern is to actually build a career, you do yourself a lot of good by building a reputation with short stories first.

Back when you did it, was it a conscious career decision, or did you just have more ideas for short pieces at the time?

Martin: Well, yeah, it was the ideas. I was still learning. You're always learning in writing, and I was always learning new tricks, trying new techniques, different viewpoints, doing a first-person story, then a third-person story, try a time-travel story, a space opera--you're trying different things. And it's good to learn them through the short story, which lends itself to experimentation. If you have an experiment that fails, well, you've only spent a few weeks or maybe a month on it, you haven't spent two years doing an experiment that's a disaster. But my stories have gotten more complex, and my themes have gotten more complex, and my characters have gotten deeper since that time, and I find it hard to write short stories now. I can still do short fiction, but they're more novellas than traditional short stories.

You've talked about ideas you have for new novellas, including Song of Ice and Fire-related pieces like the story about Dunk and Egg which you did for Robert Silverberg's Legends anthology. Is that going to have to wait until six years from now?

Martin: I'm hoping I can stick them in around some of the later books of the series, but that partially depends on whether I can deliver those books on time. Obviously if I'm running late, if I'm not meeting my deadlines, then there's less time between books. If I can deliver A Dance With Dragons in a timely manner, as I hope I can, then maybe I can buy myself a month to write a new Dunk and Egg novella before I start the fifth book.

Do you have titles for the fifth and sixth books yet?

Martin: The fourth book is A Dance With Dragons, the fifth book is The Winds of Winter. The sixth book, I'm not entirely certain yet.

Do you remember how Song of Ice and Fire started for you, the first moment where you realized you had this story you wanted to tell?

Martin: I began the series in 1991, when I was still very much involved in Hollywood. I had a few months there where I had no immediate script assignments, and I started a science fiction novel, one that had actually been in my idea books for a long time, that I'd been thinking about writing for over a decade. So I started work on it, and it was going along well. But then one day, as I sat down to write, suddenly the first chapter of A Game of Thrones came to me. Not the prologue, which is the first thing you read in the book, but the actual first chapter, which is the Bran chapter where he's taken out to see his father behead a deserter, and his brothers Robb and Jon find the direwolf pups in the snow. That came to me so vividly that I knew I had to write it. So I put the other book aside and sat down and wrote that chapter, which came very easily. And by the time I finished it, I knew what the second chapter would be, so I started writing that. Before I knew it, the other novel was gathering dust in the drawer, and I was going headlong into A Game of Thrones. As it turned out, I had to put it aside in turn, because other things came up in Hollywood, there were deadlines to be met and all that, but I never went cold on the book, which I guess is a sign of how tight a hold it had on me.

As a former TV producer, have you ever considered the possibility of adapting Song of Ice and Fire as a TV series?

Martin: Well, I'm going to have a meeting tomorrow with some people who have some ideas about that, so we'll see what comes of it. Sure, you could do it as a TV series if you had a) the time, and b) the budget, but those are huge issues. It would be a huge series. You could not do it as a four-hour movie, or even as a series of three movies, as they're doing Lord of the Rings. You would need a miniseries on the scale of Shogun, or Lonesome Dove, one of the old kinds of 24-hour series they used to do, but don't seem to do any more.

Is it true that there's a plan in the works for more Wild Cards books?

Martin: Yes, we haven't quite signed the contract yet, but it's getting close. We have a deal with Byron Preiss and his new company, ibooks. He's going to be reprinting the first eight Wild Cards books in oversized trade paperback editions, with illustrations, and doing two new Wild Cards books.

One thing they certainly have in common with Song of Ice and Fire is the degree to which they get grimmer and grimmer as time goes on. Both series seem to be about a bad situation rapidly getting worse.

Martin: Well, yeah. People have said that about Wild Cards. Maybe we got a little too carried away on that.

Can either series ever come to a happy ending? Is there such a thing in your worldview?

Martin: [Laughs, pauses.] I think there's happiness. [Pauses.] You know, the completely happy ending where everybody lives happily ever after, I don't know. I think there's always going to be a little element of bittersweet. But that remains to be seen. We haven't gotten to the endings yet.

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