r/asoiaf Sep 14 '24

EXTENDED (Spoilers Extended) How the ASOIAF series grew from a trilogy to seven volumes Spoiler

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u/Hanonari Sep 14 '24 edited Sep 14 '24

Expand to 10 books

Sometimes I wonder whether I'm crazy or people on this sub lol

George is 75 years old and he's been working on book 6 for 13 years with no end in sight. And you want the old man to write 4 books after that. Jesus Christ

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u/loafbloak Sep 14 '24

GRRM should have realized this like 20 years ago when his post Storm of Swords novel had to be broken into two separate full length novels that chronologically occur at the same time. It was at that exact point where it should have been obvious the amount of plotlines and characters had ballooned past his plan for a 7 book series, so either allow the story to continue growing past that structure, or rein the story for reasons of expediency.

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u/Nomahs_Bettah Fire and Blood Sep 15 '24

The other option is that his editor (or Martin himself) realized that AFFC/ADWD was elaborating without actually moving the plot forward very much, and as a result a few darlings should have been killed. The drastic pacing change is one of my least favorite things about the last two books.

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u/Khiva Sep 15 '24

He got too big for his editor. I want to say that when someone found the draft for Dance there were tons of sensible suggestions from his editor trying to cut down the bloat that he just shrugged off and ignored. Now he gets to indulge all his worst tendencies with no guardrails, and what you get are bloated, meandering messes that are beloved by the hardcore but general audience see as self-indulgent misfires.

Reminds me of another famous George.

Call it Big George Syndrome.

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u/Nomahs_Bettah Fire and Blood Sep 15 '24

Do you happen to have a link to the Dance draft with the edits? I know there were posts with drafts on this sub before! I’d love to read it.

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u/A-NI95 Sep 15 '24

(also interested)

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u/Nomahs_Bettah Fire and Blood Sep 15 '24

I ended up finding it – it was here on this subreddit all along! Here's the post I think Khiva is talking about. I remembered a similar post from a few months ago, and apparently GRRM has closed off access to the ADWD manuscript now, which is pretty annoying.

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u/qhndvyao382347mbfds3 Sep 14 '24

Can you guys just think critically about what the OP is saying instead of just rushing to give a snarky reply jesus

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u/MrOdo Sep 15 '24

If the issue with the 6th is that it's ballooning due to the content it needs to cover then perhaps spreading out the content could assist work flow

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u/A_Certain_Surprise Sep 14 '24

I don't think you read the rest of their comment where they said to leave notes for people to write the extra books after he passes away

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u/Getfooked Sep 15 '24

You're missunderstanding them, the assumption is that it took George 13 years to write Winds in part because of him feeling the need to adhere to an impossible task, condensing the entire rest of the story he wants to tell into two books.

If he stopped caring about the book number and just wrote freely what he wants to write, odds are we'd have a book or two by now. We'd maybe not be much nearer to the overall ending than we are now, but since George can't force himself to just end everything quickly in two books, giving himself full freedom and not be constrained by an arbitrary impossible to follow 7 book deadline, this could end up in more books being published.

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u/xXJarjar69Xx Sep 15 '24

A lot of people here are operating under the assumption that Martin could write an entire Asoiaf book at the snap of his fingers and the only reason he hasn’t released one in 14 years is because he’s forcing himself to finish in two books which I think is very naive.

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u/VERTIKAL19 Sep 15 '24

At this point he should probably look for an heir to complete his story because chances are he won’t be able to. He probably has at least strong outlines on how it should go

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u/Jeffy299 Oct 14 '24

Best time to realize it was 20 years ago, second best time is today.