You want the reader to care about your characters — if they don’t, then there’s no emotional involvement. But at the same time, I want my characters to be nuanced, to be gray, to be human beings. I think human beings are all nuanced. There’s this tendency to want to make people into heroes and villains. And I think there are villains in real life and there are heroes in real life. But even the greatest heroes have flaws and do bad things, and even the greatest villains are capable of love and pain and occasionally have moments where you can feel sympathetic for them. As much as I love science fiction and fantasy and imaginative stuff, you always have to go back to real life as your touchstone and say, ‘What is the truth?’
George R.R. Martin (x)
I had no idea when this all started where it would lead… or how long the road would be. That picture of me up above was taken in 1995 in Scotland, after I’d signed the contracts for the first three books but before I’d delivered any of them. Back then, I’d thought the whole story could be told in three books, and that it would take me three years to write them, a year per book. That picture was taken just a few weeks after I blew my first (bot not my last, oh no) deadline on the series. Ah, how innocent I was… little did that guy in the picture imagine that he would be spending most of the next two decades in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros with Tyrion, Daenerys, Arya, Sansa, Jon Snow, Bran, and all the rest.
But here I am, twenty years later… still working on book six…
Just as you grieve if a friend is killed, you should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care. If somebody dies and you just go get more popcorn, it’s a superficial experience isn’t it?
George R.R. Martin (x)
Happy 67th birthday to George R.R. Martin (September 20th, 1948).
So, you may see some extremely shocking things in the show that come up in the next season or two, but I’m not sure you could consider them ‘spoilers,’ because they’re never gonna to happen in the books. They CAN’T happen in the books, because the show and the books have gone down different roads.
George R.R. Martin, 6/23/2015 (via gotgifsandmusings)
As for the Night’s King (the form I prefer), in the books he is a legendary figure, akin to Lann the Clever and Brandon the Builder, and no more likely to have survived to the present day than they have.
I have sometimes allowed other writers to play with my children. (…) In the case of Wild Cards, it’s controlled by me. I decide who gets to borrow my creations, and I review their stories, and approve or disapproval what is done with them. “No, Popinjay would say it this way,” I say, or “Sorry, the Turtle would never do that,” or, more importantly (…), “No, absolutely not, your character may not rape my character, I don’t give a fuck how powerful you think it would be.“
George RR Martin (via inspireedd)
The past remains the past. We can learn from it, but we cannot change it.
George R.R. Martin, A Dance With Dragons (via erebores)