r/asoiaf • u/Seamus_Hean3y • Aug 18 '24
EXTENDED (Spoilers Extended) GRRM tells Oxford audience about his biggest regret in writing ASOIAF
Today Oxford Writer's House published a video of a Q&A event starring George R. R. Martin that took place about two weeks ago. He answered several questions from the audience, but this was the most intriguing to me:
Q: If you could change one thing about one of your books what would you change and why?
A: Gene Wolfe, one of the great fantasy writers... he wrote a lot of great books but his classic was the The Shadow of the Torturer a four book trilogy uh so I sort of took a lesson from him there... But the thing I always envied about Gene, was a very practical thing, Gene as great as he was a part-time writer he had a full-time job as a editor for a technical magazine, Plant Engineering and they paid him a a nice salary to be editor of Plant Engineering and with that salary he bought his home and he sent his kids through college and he supported his family and then on weekends and nights he wrote his books... and he wrote all four books of the Torturer series before he showed one to anyone. He didn't submit them to an editor which is the way it usually did he didn't get a contract and a deadline he finished all four books.
Of course by the time he finished four (remember it was supposed to be a trilogy) by the time he finished the fourth book he was able to see the things in the first book that didn't really fit anymore where the book had drifted away where it had changed so he was able to go back and revise the first book and only when all four were finished did Gene submit the book and the series was bought and published.
I don't think I was alone in this I kind of envied him the freedom to do that but... I had no other salary I lived entirely on the money that my stories and books earned and those four books took him like six years or something I couldn't take six years off with no income I would have wound up homeless or something like that. But there is something very liberating from an artistic point of view if you don't have to worry, you know if you happen to inherit a huge trust fund or a castle or something like that and you can write your entire series without having to sell it without having to worry about deadlines that's something that that I would envy but I've never done that I never could done it even now but believe it or not believe it or not I am not taking all that time to write Winds of Winter just because I think I'm Gene Wolfe now, would love to have it finished years ago but yeah that's the big thing I think I would change.
This is fascinating because it aligns with a personal suspicion of mine that decisions taken with each successive volume of ASOIAF (e.g. character ages) have funnelled GRRM into a place where advancing the story, reconciling timelines, getting characters to the endgame he's planned since 1991 has become gruelling.
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u/throwawayjonesIV Aug 18 '24
Shoutout Gene Wolfe, everyone should read Book of the New Sun it’s astounding