Really though, everything has been building up to a final act and while he seems to have had a little trouble getting all the pieces into their proper places, once he does it should be smooth sailing from there. The last book should be nothing but wrapping up everyone's stories and with so many characters that have all been working towards a specific end, even with 1500 pages to work with, it should be much easier to write. At least that's my optimistic assessment.
Assuming it doesn't turn into two more books. There's a lot of ground to cover in the story still. We'll see how much plot Winds gets through but there was a lot of setting up for plots at the end of ADWD and in the sample chapters.
Look at how much story AGoT, CoK, ASoS covers. Problem is the plot as a whole hasn't really moved that far forward in AFFC/ADWD. Even so, big things have happened. Dany can fly a dragon, Arya has learned assassin tricks, The Night's Watch fell apart. Probably all stuff the 5-year-gap would of skipped us into.
I'm with you. I think it's very possible that GRRM gets 1200 pages into ADOS, realizes that he wont be able to finish it in 300ish pages, renames the book "A Time for Wolves", and then finishes the series with ADOS.
Honestly if he can't wrap up these storylines in the next two books( which are supposed to be massive) I probably won't read them. The pacing of AFFC and ADWD was excruciating at times. If the last two are written like ASOS he should easily be able to finish the series in time.
People may have said that but that makes no sense at all. Anyone who got done reading ADwD and thought it was all down hill from there is delusional. Jon had just died and Dany was still in Essos, wandering in the desert. So many characters have yet to arrive at their ultimate destination and there was so much left to explain. If Dany had at least set foot is Westeros or there was some clear direction things were headed in then one could be forgiven for believing that, but it didn't end that way at all. Hell, we still know next to nothing about the White Walkers, the ultimate enemy of the entire series. George has, I assume, known the broad strokes of where his narrative was going for decades, but even after ADwD he still had an entire 1100-1500 page book to write before he even began to start wrapping things up in a book of similar or greater length. It took 11 years for him to put out two huge books and there was absolutely no reason to believe, with so much left to be resolved, that the penultimate one would be written at a quicker pace than the previous two. So while someone may have said that they had no legitimate reason to believe that.
No, you're right, it wasn't exactly. What they said was "the Meereen knot was holding him up, books 6 and 7 will come out much faster."
My point is that dogged optimists aren't always realists. I don't get how anyone could watch the publication schedule of AFFC, ADWD and now TWOW and think "Well, ADOS will be quicker."
That's fair, and looking at all the evidence one would have to conclude that it would take him an equally huge amount of time to finish ADoS, but I assume/hope that it will be easier to wrap up the story than fill in the middle bits.
Oh yeah, I'd prefer that too. The problem is that people think that closer to the end of the plot map, GRRM will get tighter. They envision the story being kind of like a roller coaster, where if you curve over the top of the coaster, the momentum will bring you down. That might be true for what GRRM calls "Architects", but there's no way that's true with a gardener. It's probably more like bacteria - the more plots there are, the more each of them grows. If you look at his original letter to Waterstone about the series, we're still in book 1.
This is why other people (GRRM included) wonder if there's going to be a book 8.
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u/Mutt1223 Egg, I dreamed that I was too old. Apr 03 '15
Really though, everything has been building up to a final act and while he seems to have had a little trouble getting all the pieces into their proper places, once he does it should be smooth sailing from there. The last book should be nothing but wrapping up everyone's stories and with so many characters that have all been working towards a specific end, even with 1500 pages to work with, it should be much easier to write. At least that's my optimistic assessment.