After years of writing amazing fantasies set in a world very
much like our own, like Fevre Dream (perhaps the best American
vampire novel ever) and Armageddon Rag, why would George R. R. Martin turn to a
multivolume saga of royal intrigues set in a completely imaginary medievalesque universe? "Well, it was just a story I wanted to write at the time," he shrugs
when I put the question to him in a Seattle restaurant. "I do like to, as a writer,
try different things; I think that's the only way you keep yourself fresh. If
you keep doing the same thing over and over again, I think, no matter how
good you are, you're bound to get stale." In any event, he doesn't see the A
Song of Ice and Fire series as that radical a shift from his earlier novels
and stories. "I really never made any distinctions as far as science fiction,
fantasy, and horror. I read Heinlein when I was young, and Tolkien the next
day, and Lovecraft the day after that. I read all of them and sort of lumped
them all together as close cousins, as imaginative literature, although my
father used to call them weird stuff. As in, 'Why do you like all that weird
stuff?'" But Martin has done all right by "that weird stuff," especially in
recent years, as the thousand-page-plus volumes of his fantasy series begin to
reach higher and higher positions on the New York Times bestseller list.
Like thousands of fans, I devoured each book in as few sittings as I could
possilby manage, totally caught up in the intricate shifts of balance among the
various noble families of Martin's world, and eagerly await volume four,
currently scheduled for release in the fall of 2002.
RH: In an interview a while back, you mentioned the War of the
Roses as a historical starting point from which you soon went off
in very different directions.
GRRM: If I was going to do something with a medieval flavor, I wanted to
know as much about the medieval period as I could to try to capture that with a
little verisimilitude, so I read a lot of history. I'd read history anyway, because
I love it. I'd read about the Wars of the Roses, the Hundred Years War, the
Crusades-- they were all grist for the mill, probably the Wars of the Roses and
the Hundred Years War more than anything else. Some fans have taken that
too far and have looked for exact parallels to the Wars of the Roses, to say this
character is actually Edward IV and this character is Richard III but none of
that really holds up. My characters, while they may be inspired in one facet
or another, are not actual historical characters under other names. I prefer to
do something other than that.
RH: And the whole point of a "departure point" is that you're not
beholden to that exact sequence of events.
GRRM: That's true. I wanted these books to have some of the feel of
historical fiction, but with the added suspense of not knowing what sort of
resolution there would be. I read a lot of historical fiction, but the problem
with historical fiction is that if you know the history, you know how it's going
to come out. So, any suspense is necessarily limited or at least is of a different
kind than when you read a story where you don't know how it's going to end.
RH: The series was originally planned as a trilogy, right?
GRRM: That was my original conception, but it became apparent even
before I finished the first book that I had too much story and too many
characters to be able to do it in three books, even three huge books. So now
I'm looking at six books.
RH: How much of the world and the narrative did you have
figured out before you wrote the first word of the first volume?
GRRM: I have a general idea, but I don't have a detailed outline. I prefer
not to work that way. I think that's where the writing comes in, as much as
choosing words--determining the actual events and how they're going to
unfold. And I prefer to discover that in the course of writing. But I do know
the major events that are going to occur later down the road, I know the
ultimate destination. What I don't know is every twist and turn, or the ultimate
fate of every minor character. Some of those things I'll work out in the course
of writing.
RH: Do you have a favorite character?
GRRM: I love them all. They're all my kids in that respect. But I got to
admit that Tyrion is my favorite. He's very easy to write and he's a beautiful
shade of gray. I like gray characters. I think all black and all white
characters are, by their very nature, boring and one-dimensional. But gray
characters can have all the subtle shadings and contradictions that make us
human and make for an interesting person. And Tyrion is certainly that.
RH: How do you maintain the pace? What's your writing
schedule like?
GRRM: Well, I write every day, except Sundays during NFL season. I get
up in the morning, have my coffee, and go write. On a day that it goes good, I
start work and when I look up, it's dark outside. On a different day, I may
struggle and every word comes with a few drops of blood, and I might I tear up
everything the following day.
RH: The bulk and the pacing of the series allows you to unfold
character's motivations, and the dynamics of your fictional
cultures, very slowly. In the first book, for example, Theon is
there, although his role is somewhat vague, and it's not until a
thousand pages later that his role becomes a lot clearer.
GRRM: It's something you can do given the epic scale of the books and
the size of the books, and that's valuable. I worked in Hollywood before
beginning this series and enjoyed many things about it, but still, for a
television program, you have a certain number of minutes. You can't exceed
that. You can't go over. You have to be descriptive within a certain length so
for ten years I had been in the habit of cutting and trimming and making
scripts into a very tight fit. After a decade of that, I was really in the mood to
do something more expansive, something that gave me room to do the kind of
things that you're talking about.
RH: Not everybody in your world has the ability to do magic.
When it occurs, it's really magical--a special, bizarre event.
GRRM: I think the handling of magic in fantasy is one of the genre's
trickiest aspects, one where we have to make a very important decision going
in. I wrestled with this for a long time when I was first starting the books. I
looked at Tolkien, of course, who's regarded as the very master of modern
fantasy. Virtually everything that all of us are doing today is pretty much
patterned to Lord of the Rings, which created the genre as it now exists.
Middle Earth is a very magical place. You read the books and you certainly get
the view that magic suffuses the world and the culture, but there's actually
very little onstage magic. Gandalf is a wizard, but he fights with a sword; he
doesn't perform incantations or pull down lightning from the sky. Most of the
magic, when it does occur, is of great import, but he never really gives wiring
diagrams as to how it works.
To my mind, that worked, and it worked better than most of the other
alternatives I've seen. If you make magic too explicit, it ceases to become
magical. Magic should be wondrous and terrifying. It should be outside our
realm of knowledge--supernatural, not natural. That's the way I tried to
handle it. I've also made a decision which relates to the design of the books, to
increase the amount of magic in each book. So, Game of Thrones has the least
magic and there's a little more in Clash of Kings and yet a little more in Storm
of Swords, and that will continue as the series progresses.
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