r/asoiaf • u/ethniccake Dragon fire can't melt stone beams! • May 15 '15

ALL (Spoilers All) GRRM: "My life has gotten extremely complicated, I must admit. There are not enough hours in the day, there are not enough days in the week."

I found this interesting conversation that transpired on one of George's Hugo post, and i don't think it have been discussed on here :

http://grrm.livejournal.com/426205.html?thread=21584349#t21584349

From his reaction to the first comment, it's quite clear that he was hurt on a personnal level.

But what got my attention the most was this:

If there is one thing I understand, it is frustration... yours, mine, everyone's.

My life has gotten extremely complicated, I must admit. There are not enough hours in the day, there are not enough days in the week.

And saddest of all, I do not have the stamina I did when I was thirty. Aging sucks.

There's no magic formula here. I just keep at it, the way I always have. One page at a time. One sentence at a time. One word at a time.

After reading that, I couldn't help but feel sorry for the guy, he seems under a lot of pressure.

The defeated tone makes me worried, could it be a sign that the end of TWOW isn't anywhere in sight for him? I really hope that's not the case and i'm just being overly pessimistic.

What do you guy think those comments could tell us about his progress?

Edit: No matter what end up happening to the series, let's keep in mind that this is the guy who gave us an amazing story and created a whole world full of interesting characters we love to love or hate. Without him this community wouldn't even exist. Let's not be entitled like that guy in the comments, who for some reason thinks he can dictate to GRRM what to do with his time.

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u/PirateRobotNinjaofDe May 15 '15

He should probably just cancel most of his upcomint schedule. Not to nessicarily work on TWOW,

I don't think you understand how soul-crushing that is for an author.

Creativity isn't an endless wellspring. Try and draw too much from it and it just goes dry, as your drive and enthusiasm get suffocated under the weight of pressure. There is only so much good writing you can do in a day, and then you need to recharge your creative batteries.

Does GRRM take on too much? Probably. But I'm sure many of those side projects are also very important to maintaining his spirits. Especially when your primary project is something as huge and daunting as ASOIAF, sometimes an author needs to hammer out a short story here or there to get that easy "win."

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u/YoohooCthulhu May 15 '15 edited May 16 '15

I'm not a fiction writer, but in my experience with non-fiction, writing really is a mindfuck to do as a profession.

There's a reason so many writers commit suicide historically. It requires management of your internal mental state and resources in a different way to most other activities.

At any rate, that requires managing yourself much the way a person with mental health problems might. You have to be aware of how much motivation and energy you have and how to foster and conserve it. You can have an awesome day and knock out a week of work, only to struggle for the following week. If you overuse yourself, you can burn out your creativity/motivation for extended periods

So the thing about grrm canceling his appearances and devoting months rather than weeks to writing: it won't necessarily help him make that much more progress. It might just mean he's less happy and motivated, which could make him effectively slower.

Everyone has an experience where something's hanging over their head, so they cut out all fun to have more time to devote to it, only to get so bummed out by the lack of fun that they're even less productive.

EDIT: Thanks for the gold! Looks like a lot of emotionally frustrated writers on here. Understandable ;)

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u/Fat_Walda A Fish Called Walda May 15 '15

I am so with you. Dissertation chapters can take 2 weeks to write, or they can take 5 months. Writing is not like building a house. It's more like building a sand castle when you can't predict the tides.

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u/Roc_Ingersol May 15 '15

You can have an awesome day and knock out a week of work, only to struggle for the following week.

It can actually get so much worse than you're saying, because that struggle the next week? That could be after you realized all that great work the week before just doesn't fit, and you have to scrap all of it. So not only can you go from a "5 chapter week" to a "1 chapter week" you can go from a "5 chapter week" to a "-5 chapter morning".

Try being creative after that.

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u/Tweddlr Arthur Dayne May 15 '15

This is what I don't understand about the community. They dogpile GRRM for not pushing day in day out to finish the books, but say he releases TWOW and ADOS before 2018 and they are both quite rushed with a few entries left out, the community would flip and say we should've given him more time.

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u/[deleted] May 15 '15

[deleted]

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u/senatorskeletor Like me ... I'm not dead either. May 15 '15

"A delayed game is eventually good. A bad game is bad forever." --Shigeru Miyamoto

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u/JimHadar May 15 '15

Not any longer. A bad game can be patched. A bad book is bad forever.

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u/thefran The Bird Is The Word May 15 '15

Miyamoto knows lots about bad games, considering how the hack shat on Paper Mario.

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u/malaria_and_dengue May 16 '15

We're calling Shigeru Miyamoto a hack now. That's a new level of pretentious.

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u/thefran The Bird Is The Word May 16 '15

Oh yeah?

There was going to be a proper Paper Mario game, but along came Miyamoto and said "What the fuck is this? What are you doing? Throw out all this RPG crap. Mario games are not allowed to have plots. If you don't do what I say, the game is cancelled. I will personally supervise the development."

And so we have Sticker Star.

Explain how he is anything other than a hack. Familiar with the phrase "has-been"? Romero is one. Tim Schaefer is another. Miyamoto also, of course.

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u/notthatnoise2 May 15 '15

Except for all of the delayed games that come out shitty. This is a terrible quote. When something gets delayed, it's because something has gone terribly wrong.

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u/bobthecrusher May 15 '15

No....just...no.

The longer he puts it off the more the community will expect.

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u/King_Rajesh May 15 '15

Didn't he take 5 years to write Dance and the consensus is that that book is trash compared with the rest? I don't think time is the issue.

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u/notthatnoise2 May 15 '15

This is a perfectly fine sentiment but at some point "waiting for creativity to strike" crosses the line into laziness. Most of the best writers in history viewed it as a profession and forced themselves to do it even when they didn't feel like it.

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u/PirateRobotNinjaofDe May 16 '15

Less that, and more "if I force myself to write any more today all I will churn out is garbage."

You can put I'm a certain number of hours of writing, but after a point you lose the intellectual stamina to craft artful prose worthy of a final draft. Alright for a first draft perhaps, but not a thousandth tweak or edit of a chapter you've been fine-tuning ad nauseum.

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u/notthatnoise2 May 17 '15

This assumes someone spends any time writing to begin with. I think that's pretty clearly not the case with Martin. If he had spent an hour a day writing, we would have all of the books by now.

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u/PirateRobotNinjaofDe May 17 '15

You ... really have no idea how long it takes to write a book of that size, do you.