Warning: A few spoilers below for the previous books.
So the worst has happened and all of our darkest fears have been realized.
George R.R. Martin has not finished "The Winds of Winter," and the book will not arrive before season 6 of Game of Thrones.
You can read his blog post from earlier today explaining what happened.
"Here it is, the first of January. The book is not done, not delivered. No words can change that. I tried, I promise you. I failed. I blew the Halloween deadline, and I've now blown the end of the year deadline. And that almost certainly means that no, THE WINDS OF WINTER will not be published before the sixth season of GAME OF THRONES premieres in April (mid April, we are now told, not early April, but those two weeks will not save me). Even as late as my birthday and our big Emmy win, I still thought I could do it... but the days and weeks flew by faster than the pile of pages grew, and (as I often do) I grew unhappy with some of the choices I'd made and began to revise... and suddenly it was October, and then November... and as the suspicion grew that I would not make it after all, a gloom set in, and I found myself struggling even more. The fewer the days, the greater the stress, and the slower the pace of my writing became."
Cue the howling from the fans. Cue the shouts about how GRRM is getting old and he's going to die before the series is done. Cue the crying about spoilers in season 6. Cue the claims of betrayal, of laziness, of disloyalty, etc.
"George should have stopped with all his other appearances so he could just write," some people will say. "He should have quit updating his blog. He should have stopped watching football. He should have sold (or never bought) the Jean Cocteau Cinema. He should have just sequestered himself in his office, with an IV drip to keep him going and maybe a little camping cot in the corner so he could grab a few hours of sleep here and there, and just KEPT WRITING."
Here's the thing: I'm willing bet good money that most of you people saying these things are not writers. Or if you are writers, you're not serious writers, because no serious writer would be so stupid.
Here are a few points.
1) George R.R. Martin doesn't owe you a goddamned thing. Might he die before the books are finished? It's possible. Not likely, but shit happens. We could all be obliterated by an asteroid, too, or by the Wyoming supervolcano.
You know what? Deal with it. You don't own him and you don't own his creativity. You'll get the book when you get it. Or you won't and we'll all be dead and it won't matter anyway.
2) The writing process just doesn't work like we, the fans, may want it to work. Sure, deadlines are important — as a screenwriter, if you miss a deadline you're likely to cost a production hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars and you'll probably be fired. If you're a TV writer, the pressure is just that much more intense.
But writing a 90 to 120 page screenplay (or a 47 to 55 page TV episode) is not the same as writing a 1,500 page novel set in a highly detailed fictional universe with literally thousands of years of history, hundreds of characters, and an entire world mythology to deal with. Aside from the drastically reduced word count, most screenwriters and TV writers are working off some sort of an outline that can, at the very least, serve as a lighthouse in the distance showing them which way to go. If you're a novelist like John Grisham or Sara Paretsky or James Patterson, you might be doing something similar. This is why those writers can turn out tightly plotted, entertaining books with seeming clockwork regularity.
But if you're GRRM writing "The Winds of Winter" — or Stephen King writing "The Dark Tower," or J.RR. Tolkien writing "The Lord of the Rings" or "The Silmarillion," or even Jonathan Franzen writing "Freedom" or David Foster Wallace writing "Infinite Jest" — that's probably not going to be the case. If you're one of those folks, you're more like Jim White after he discovered Carlsbad Caverns — pushing forward with nothing but a lantern, unable to see more than three feet in front of you, swallowed by a darkness that's seemingly without end.
I'm sorry to disappoint, but you don't just sit down in front of the computer and churn out 20 pages a day like you're doing data entry. If you do do that, you're likely a pretty shitty writer. Writing is very often a process of indecision, false starts and painful course corrections. Even if you're working off an outline, you rarely if ever get it right the first time.
And it doesn't happen in a vacuum. To be able to write effectively, you need to live an active, purposeful life. To be inspired, you need to put yourself in position to encounter inspiration. That only happens through experience and engagement with the world around you. You never know where the next idea will come from — it could be a conversation with a friend, or a drive through the mountains, or a war, or even a bloody shootout with bank robbers. But I can tell you that it almost never comes from sitting in a dark room by yourself. It's no accident that most of our best writers — Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, Maya Angelou, on and on and on —lived big, messy, complicated lives.
GRRM's life is hopefully less messy than, say, Charles Bukowski's. But I can't begrudge him his afternoon football games, his movie theater, his convention appearances, his life with his family and friends, or his engagement with the New Mexico film and arts community, because I know that those things are just as integral to his process as the actual typing. You need to get out and do things so that you can refill the well of wherever the inspiration comes from.
3) If avoiding spoilers is important to you, then avoid them. It's not always easy, but it can be done. It takes a certain amount of work and discipline to resist clicking on this episode recap or that Facebook post, but it takes far less discipline than it does to, say, write a 1,500 page novel from scratch. Maybe just maybe it's on you to do some of the work.
But I watch the show TOO! you whine. Am I supposed to just give that up?
Yes. You are. If the books are more important to you than the show, then that's the choice you will have to make. This is the real world, kid. Life is full of hard choices, and you don't always get what you want.
But what if something does get spoiled? What if one of your stupid friends says "Holy shit, can you believe that Dani turned out to be a man?" without knowing that you've stopped watching the show and have been engaged for months in a monk-like process of ascetic self denial.
So what? I'm guessing you have a favorite book or movie, and that you have not read or watched that book or movie only once. I'm sure you enjoyed it just as much, if not more, the second, third, tenth, twentieth time through it.
Here's a little secret: good stories may be about what happens, but great stories are about HOW it happens. They're about all the little details and character choices that lead up to the thing happening, not the thing itself.
When I started reading "A Song of Ice and Fire," I managed to spoil two big things for myself early on: Ned's fate and the Red Wedding. I learned about what happened to Ned because some magazine profile on GRRM mentioned it. I was pretty pissed at that reporter for not putting a spoiler warning up front until I remembered that the book came out in 1996 and it was now 2011. I'd had plenty of time to get caught up beforehand.
The Red Wedding was my own damn fault. I went to A Wiki of Ice and Fire to look up something else and I just sort of stumbled on it. I think I was halfway through "A Clash of Kings" at the time so it was a pretty solid punch to the gut.
But did either of the revelations ruin the books for me? No! In fact, in a way they almost deepened my experience. There was something exciting about the dread that came from reading and knowing what dark shit was just over the horizon. When Ned had his conversation with Cersei in the godswood in "A Game of Thrones," I wanted to scream at him because I could see him make the choice that would ultimately lead to his death. It was like watching a slow motion car accident.
In "A Storm of Swords," when Robb arrived back to Riverrun with Jeyne Westering and introduced her to Lady Catalyn as his wife, I had a similar reaction. My stomach fell into my shoes because, since I knew the Red Wedding was coming, I could recognize that as the moment where he had sealed his fate. Everything that came after that, including all the negotiations with the Freys, were infused with a sharp sense of tragedy.
Would it have been nice to experience either of those major events without having had them spoiled for me? Sure. But I can't say it made me enjoy them any less, or weakened their impact when they happened.
I stopped watching Game of Thrones after season 4, partly to avoid upcoming spoilers and partly because, frankly, I just don't think the show is all that good anymore. I found that I was hate-watching the show more than I was enjoying it, so I decided to stop bothering with it altogether.
But I did hear about the whole Stannis/Shareen thing. For one thing, I'm not convinced it's a spoiler because the show has gone so wildly off down its own path already. But even if it is... okay, well now I'm curious how that's going to work. If anything, it's made me more intrigued about "The Winds of Winter" than I was before.
Look, I get it. I get the impatience. I read an update like this and there's definitely a small part of me that wants chain the guy to his chair and make him finish the book at gunpoint.
But I want the book to be good more than I want to have it now. I was a rabid fan of Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" series, but I wasn't all that satisfied with the direction he took it in the last two books. He had been subjected to some very similar fan pressure and I can't help but think his decision to write the last three books in a rush didn't do the series (or the fans) any favors in the long run. I still love the series, but I always wonder what might have been if we'd all just shut the fuck up and let him get on with it in his own time.
I don't want to see that happen with "A Song of Ice and Fire."
So, George, just keep doing what you're doing.
I'll be here when you're ready.
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