Someone else said this once and I think it's the best explanation I've heard as to what likely happened. (This analogy involves the HBO adaptation)
Imagine you're at a party and you're telling the best joke you know. It's an absolute ripper, but the set-up is very long. Still, everyone around you is listening to you, engrossed, and anticipating the amazing punchline.
Suddenly someone else jumps in and interrupts you and says "Oh yeah I know this one," and they finish the joke for you.
Except their punchline isn't anywhere near as good as the one you were working towards. It's okay--it's an ending. You would have done a lot better. But now this guy has just gone ahead and blurted out a less-good-but-passable version of what *you* were going to say. A lot of your audience have now walked away, some of them are waiting around looking at you but all the steam has gone out of it.
I like the analogy. However, I think if I had GRRM's bank account, I'd still finish the joke.
Here's another theory, maybe GRRM was Andy Kaufman this whole time, and starting a beloved series he never intended to finish but kept saying he would is a long, elaborate Andy Kaufman joke.
I think it's partially this, but I think what happened (and keeps happening) is that GRRM saw the ending spoiled by the show and then the backlash and sat down to make a new ending. Probably thought it would be relatively simple, but realized his story had only one ending. Who knows how many versions of this book he's written the last fifteen years?
At a convention in 2012, I asked what I thought was a clever question that even THEN it was clearly obvious was becoming s thing. "Are you still in love with ASOIAF or are you just staying together for the kids?"
I kind of hate the phrasing of “he doesn’t owe us anything.”
In the technical legal sense? Sure.
In the moral sense? Not nearly as clear. His readers invested their time, money, effort, and emotion based on his representations : 1) the series had x number of parts and 2) he was going to tell us all those parts.
How many people never pick up the first book if they know the series is never going to be completed? Some people, of course, would anyway, but I’d hazard a guess it’s not nearly as many.
I’m of a similar mind. It is, at the end of a day, a job, and he isn’t doing his job by not finishing the series. As mentioned in my piece, most of us don’t have the luxury of submitting our work 15 years late.
I agree with you. It’s like going to a restaurant, being seated, then being told to get out. You didn’t pay for anything yet so the restaurant doesn’t owe you anything but that just makes it a shitty restaurant.
“He doesn’t owe you anything!”
“Yeah that means I can call him a shitty writer who’s fat and lazy until he demonstrates otherwise”.
While I can't claim to know what George is thinking, if it were me, I'd at least finish the series for my own sake. Fans or no fans, I'd do it for ME.
But that's just me.
Agree 100% on the character bit. Say what you will about George's world view, style, etc., the man knows how to craft characters, especially character VOICE. Most newly tradpubbed fantasy authors don't even come close to this level of development (for good or ill).
His writing of voice is fantastic. His dialogue is also incredible. Often dialogue is what kills a book for me. I could not get into the Expanse books at all because I found the Joss Whedonesque dialogue unpalatable. I eventually watched the show and liked it. I knew from friends it had a compelling story, but the book dialogue was bad. GRRM just has a natural talent for writing people and understanding their inner turmoil and all their self-conscious and self-destructive traits.
He depresses me too. I recently finished reading the book series and i was at the ending of the last, I turned every page slower as I remembered, how depressing george is. I have F&B, i love the show (s1 to be exact, s2 was a total doomfest with some likeable moments). But its not the same story telling as GOT and I’ll miss that dearly. Some part of me hopes he has already written and edited and wrapped up all the books in the series and is just waiting to publish them after he dies or something. That unlikely, and you’re probably right to lose faith in him BUT IM YOUng!!! I will not lose hope.
However, a big fear of mine is someone else taking over his work for him, much like the shows writers did and how frank herberts son did for him and completely ruin a good thing, eventhough unfinished, once again. What are your thoughts on that david? Im sure after he passes and if it remains unfinished, such a big capitalistically profitable opportunity will unfortunately be explored without respect to how the author left it.
Anyways, for now, i guess i’ll play elden ring and look for sips of george in the random side quests hes doing.
I am of the mind that if the original author dies, it’s best to leave the work unfinished than the whole passing of the baton thing. Whenever I hear things like “Frank’s son based the novels on extensive notes his father left behind” I call bullshit. Even if the author who takes over writes really good work, it will still never be what the original author intended. I’d rather a half-finished WoW with bullet points detailing the ending than a different person wrapping it up.
I haven’t read that series. It’s a personal preference of mine, I’m just not a fan of the concept of someone else taking over the work started by someone else. Whether it’s good or not is mostly irrelevant to me, it just won’t feel right.
GRRM has said two things that I think were pretty revealing, but they seem forgotten.
1. When people started comparing the series to Lord of the Rings, this put so much pressure on Martin that he began to doubt that anything he wrote was good enough. I don't have the exact quote, but I remember it had the phrase "for the ages" in it. As in, if this series is really for the ages, is it really good enough? This kind of pressure can be death to the creative process.
2. More recently, he said he asked his wife if she had seen his talent lying around the house anywhere. Where did my talent go? Have you seen it? I thought people should have jumped all over that quote, but it seemed to pass unnoticed.
If that's the case, that saddens me to think he feels that way. He's immensely talented. I wish through all the backlash and anger, he understand the majority of the vocal fans simply love his work and want to continue experiencing it.
Agreed. And I want to add that I didn't really mean people *should* have jumped on that quote, not in a cruel way. I think the whole discourse should have been more compassionate, in both directions. Was just surprised the fans didn't key in on that quote. It was right there.
I don’t think that Martin “owes us anything”. But he was (presumably) paid a large advance for WoW, and the reason for the publisher to pay that advance is that Martin traded on fans’ current enthusiasm for future projects. The logic is given that you bought the book and that’s all you get. But the interest people had had monetary value, which was capitalized but never repaid. Sure, the people who lost actual money were the publishers. But I don’t think it’s totally unreasonable for the readers to feel like they were used.
I had to bury this dream deep deep down. I now read fan fiction to come to a better conclusion. I hope post mortem he always a writer he trusts to finish the series.
Gonna be honest, I haven't been interested in a few years because of the reality that the books will never be completed so I made myself stop and now I just focus on my true love: Arda and Middle Earth. I can't even watch House of the Dragon knowing how it ends for Dany.
There was a really good one on youtube that I listened to for years and I can't remember his name
I recently bought the History of Middle Earth collection compiled by JRR Tolkien’s son. I forget how many volumes it is, but it’s enough to keep me occupied for a very long time.
GRRM does not technically owe any of us who bought and read his books any more.
But a question comes to mind. Would GRRM have gained the fame and wealth that he has if he had made it clear early on that he would never finish ASoIaF?
As a housewife LARPing as an amateur writer, I can't even keep all the facts of my relatively small fantasy world in my head at once. I actually uploaded all of my world building into a custom AI bot and ask it questions about my own world as I write, so I don't get details wrong. He has a vast world with many different plot threads. If he hasn't been making consistent progress on a story of that size for even a few months, it'd be hard to pick back up. He's also (I'm sorry) quite old. He might not even know you can use AI like this. And he has legions of frustrated and extremely devoted fans who would definitely call him out for getting details wrong, introducing plot holes, etc (and with the amount of plot lines he has, I wouldn't be surprised if he did, especially after so many years). In his shoes, the task would feel simply impossible. He may even be like me-- I overcome writer's block by just writing and building out underdeveloped aspects of my world and something comes together and get me over that hump. Sometimes I get more excited these side quests than the main story. Which might explain the number of spin offs he's done.
Everything you said is valid and understandable BUT again I go back to the fact that he has an amazing privilege few working people are rewarded. Say we accept everything you said, the complexity of his worldbuilding, various threads, etc, then what is the appropriate amount of time to give him to finish?
You’re absolutely right, he is old, and he’s only going to get older. I think in his head he will find any excuse under the sun not to finish it.
It makes me sad because I love his work and the idea of opening a new GRRM book for the first time is exciting, and the fact that we might not get that ever again is a hard pill to swallow.
Right. It’s not an excuse. I’m really disappointed and can’t even consume another ASOIAF property without being mildly irritated these days. That’s just what I imagine happened 😆 Or at least, how it would happen to me if I were GRRM.
I do think if he made a real and sustained effort, he find passion for the work again. He could even upload his entire corpus to AI and let it do the remembering for him. But it seems that he has well and truly lost interest. Maybe it feels insurmountable.
I think GRRM was always just writing for the money. He wrote and edited a lot of different things before GOT, and he seems to have just jumped onto the Robert Jordan era fantasy doorstopper trend. When he got the money, he stopped.
I don’t buy into that. He’s far too talented and passionate to do it just for the money. I think that very same passion is what’s preventing him from finishing this universe he created. If it were just for the money, he’d be pumping out a book a month like a James Patterson or someone of that ilk.
Someone else said this once and I think it's the best explanation I've heard as to what likely happened. (This analogy involves the HBO adaptation)
Imagine you're at a party and you're telling the best joke you know. It's an absolute ripper, but the set-up is very long. Still, everyone around you is listening to you, engrossed, and anticipating the amazing punchline.
Suddenly someone else jumps in and interrupts you and says "Oh yeah I know this one," and they finish the joke for you.
Except their punchline isn't anywhere near as good as the one you were working towards. It's okay--it's an ending. You would have done a lot better. But now this guy has just gone ahead and blurted out a less-good-but-passable version of what *you* were going to say. A lot of your audience have now walked away, some of them are waiting around looking at you but all the steam has gone out of it.
Do you finish the joke?
I like the analogy. However, I think if I had GRRM's bank account, I'd still finish the joke.
Here's another theory, maybe GRRM was Andy Kaufman this whole time, and starting a beloved series he never intended to finish but kept saying he would is a long, elaborate Andy Kaufman joke.
I think it's partially this, but I think what happened (and keeps happening) is that GRRM saw the ending spoiled by the show and then the backlash and sat down to make a new ending. Probably thought it would be relatively simple, but realized his story had only one ending. Who knows how many versions of this book he's written the last fifteen years?
At a convention in 2012, I asked what I thought was a clever question that even THEN it was clearly obvious was becoming s thing. "Are you still in love with ASOIAF or are you just staying together for the kids?"
He didn't answer the question.
What if your question all those years ago is what set him down this path of not finishing the book?
Lol. As I was typing my comment I was thinking just that! It's me. I'm sorry.
I kind of hate the phrasing of “he doesn’t owe us anything.”
In the technical legal sense? Sure.
In the moral sense? Not nearly as clear. His readers invested their time, money, effort, and emotion based on his representations : 1) the series had x number of parts and 2) he was going to tell us all those parts.
How many people never pick up the first book if they know the series is never going to be completed? Some people, of course, would anyway, but I’d hazard a guess it’s not nearly as many.
I’m of a similar mind. It is, at the end of a day, a job, and he isn’t doing his job by not finishing the series. As mentioned in my piece, most of us don’t have the luxury of submitting our work 15 years late.
I agree with you. It’s like going to a restaurant, being seated, then being told to get out. You didn’t pay for anything yet so the restaurant doesn’t owe you anything but that just makes it a shitty restaurant.
“He doesn’t owe you anything!”
“Yeah that means I can call him a shitty writer who’s fat and lazy until he demonstrates otherwise”.
Perfect analogy. People have a right to be angry. Some take it too far, as is often the case in the internet. But, the apologists are just silly.
Based. Fire and Blood, being the only of his I’ve read, was fucking sick. Aegon iii; I cannot for the life of me get him out of my head.
I would say read ASOIF. I'd say you could probably read all five books five times over and WoW would be no closer to coming out.
While I can't claim to know what George is thinking, if it were me, I'd at least finish the series for my own sake. Fans or no fans, I'd do it for ME.
But that's just me.
Agree 100% on the character bit. Say what you will about George's world view, style, etc., the man knows how to craft characters, especially character VOICE. Most newly tradpubbed fantasy authors don't even come close to this level of development (for good or ill).
His writing of voice is fantastic. His dialogue is also incredible. Often dialogue is what kills a book for me. I could not get into the Expanse books at all because I found the Joss Whedonesque dialogue unpalatable. I eventually watched the show and liked it. I knew from friends it had a compelling story, but the book dialogue was bad. GRRM just has a natural talent for writing people and understanding their inner turmoil and all their self-conscious and self-destructive traits.
Completely agree.
He depresses me too. I recently finished reading the book series and i was at the ending of the last, I turned every page slower as I remembered, how depressing george is. I have F&B, i love the show (s1 to be exact, s2 was a total doomfest with some likeable moments). But its not the same story telling as GOT and I’ll miss that dearly. Some part of me hopes he has already written and edited and wrapped up all the books in the series and is just waiting to publish them after he dies or something. That unlikely, and you’re probably right to lose faith in him BUT IM YOUng!!! I will not lose hope.
However, a big fear of mine is someone else taking over his work for him, much like the shows writers did and how frank herberts son did for him and completely ruin a good thing, eventhough unfinished, once again. What are your thoughts on that david? Im sure after he passes and if it remains unfinished, such a big capitalistically profitable opportunity will unfortunately be explored without respect to how the author left it.
Anyways, for now, i guess i’ll play elden ring and look for sips of george in the random side quests hes doing.
Great read btw david!!
I am of the mind that if the original author dies, it’s best to leave the work unfinished than the whole passing of the baton thing. Whenever I hear things like “Frank’s son based the novels on extensive notes his father left behind” I call bullshit. Even if the author who takes over writes really good work, it will still never be what the original author intended. I’d rather a half-finished WoW with bullet points detailing the ending than a different person wrapping it up.
Sanderson did a decent job wrapping up WoT. Or at least, I haven't seen many WoT fans complain about the ending.
I haven’t read that series. It’s a personal preference of mine, I’m just not a fan of the concept of someone else taking over the work started by someone else. Whether it’s good or not is mostly irrelevant to me, it just won’t feel right.
GRRM has said two things that I think were pretty revealing, but they seem forgotten.
1. When people started comparing the series to Lord of the Rings, this put so much pressure on Martin that he began to doubt that anything he wrote was good enough. I don't have the exact quote, but I remember it had the phrase "for the ages" in it. As in, if this series is really for the ages, is it really good enough? This kind of pressure can be death to the creative process.
2. More recently, he said he asked his wife if she had seen his talent lying around the house anywhere. Where did my talent go? Have you seen it? I thought people should have jumped all over that quote, but it seemed to pass unnoticed.
If that's the case, that saddens me to think he feels that way. He's immensely talented. I wish through all the backlash and anger, he understand the majority of the vocal fans simply love his work and want to continue experiencing it.
Agreed. And I want to add that I didn't really mean people *should* have jumped on that quote, not in a cruel way. I think the whole discourse should have been more compassionate, in both directions. Was just surprised the fans didn't key in on that quote. It was right there.
I don’t think that Martin “owes us anything”. But he was (presumably) paid a large advance for WoW, and the reason for the publisher to pay that advance is that Martin traded on fans’ current enthusiasm for future projects. The logic is given that you bought the book and that’s all you get. But the interest people had had monetary value, which was capitalized but never repaid. Sure, the people who lost actual money were the publishers. But I don’t think it’s totally unreasonable for the readers to feel like they were used.
Exactly. Well said.
I had to bury this dream deep deep down. I now read fan fiction to come to a better conclusion. I hope post mortem he always a writer he trusts to finish the series.
Any fan fiction you’ve come across that satisfied the urge?
Gonna be honest, I haven't been interested in a few years because of the reality that the books will never be completed so I made myself stop and now I just focus on my true love: Arda and Middle Earth. I can't even watch House of the Dragon knowing how it ends for Dany.
There was a really good one on youtube that I listened to for years and I can't remember his name
I recently bought the History of Middle Earth collection compiled by JRR Tolkien’s son. I forget how many volumes it is, but it’s enough to keep me occupied for a very long time.
That's a good one!
GRRM does not technically owe any of us who bought and read his books any more.
But a question comes to mind. Would GRRM have gained the fame and wealth that he has if he had made it clear early on that he would never finish ASoIaF?
That’s a very valid question.
I think he wrote himself into a corner and can't figure out how to end the series.
That's why he'll do anything but finish it.
If that is the case, why doesn’t he just do a Monty-Python-and-the-Holy-Grail-ending? I’d be okay with that.
"I think about my own death almost every day, and I'm in my thirties."
Chronic illness? :(
Do you consider being born and existing a chronic illness? If so, yes.
Lol, I do not. Your thirties are too young to be thinking so much about death, good sir!
How nice for you.
That fat fuck owes me a book
Sorry that you’re disappointed, but it is very funny that this happened twice. (referring to the WoT, just in case)
As a housewife LARPing as an amateur writer, I can't even keep all the facts of my relatively small fantasy world in my head at once. I actually uploaded all of my world building into a custom AI bot and ask it questions about my own world as I write, so I don't get details wrong. He has a vast world with many different plot threads. If he hasn't been making consistent progress on a story of that size for even a few months, it'd be hard to pick back up. He's also (I'm sorry) quite old. He might not even know you can use AI like this. And he has legions of frustrated and extremely devoted fans who would definitely call him out for getting details wrong, introducing plot holes, etc (and with the amount of plot lines he has, I wouldn't be surprised if he did, especially after so many years). In his shoes, the task would feel simply impossible. He may even be like me-- I overcome writer's block by just writing and building out underdeveloped aspects of my world and something comes together and get me over that hump. Sometimes I get more excited these side quests than the main story. Which might explain the number of spin offs he's done.
Everything you said is valid and understandable BUT again I go back to the fact that he has an amazing privilege few working people are rewarded. Say we accept everything you said, the complexity of his worldbuilding, various threads, etc, then what is the appropriate amount of time to give him to finish?
You’re absolutely right, he is old, and he’s only going to get older. I think in his head he will find any excuse under the sun not to finish it.
It makes me sad because I love his work and the idea of opening a new GRRM book for the first time is exciting, and the fact that we might not get that ever again is a hard pill to swallow.
Right. It’s not an excuse. I’m really disappointed and can’t even consume another ASOIAF property without being mildly irritated these days. That’s just what I imagine happened 😆 Or at least, how it would happen to me if I were GRRM.
I do think if he made a real and sustained effort, he find passion for the work again. He could even upload his entire corpus to AI and let it do the remembering for him. But it seems that he has well and truly lost interest. Maybe it feels insurmountable.
I think GRRM was always just writing for the money. He wrote and edited a lot of different things before GOT, and he seems to have just jumped onto the Robert Jordan era fantasy doorstopper trend. When he got the money, he stopped.
I don’t buy into that. He’s far too talented and passionate to do it just for the money. I think that very same passion is what’s preventing him from finishing this universe he created. If it were just for the money, he’d be pumping out a book a month like a James Patterson or someone of that ilk.
God I do not envy his position.
I do envy his money though!!!
Monkey paw, you attain his deep pockets but you ALSO are suddenly 76 years old oooooo! (tbh had to look it up, thought he was older, 76, eh maybe!)
Considering I currently have the body of a 76 year old, I'd gladly accept the deep pockets at this point.