Last week, George R.R. Martin surprised no one and disappointed everyone when he announced that The Winds of Winter would not come out before the next season of the Game of Thrones TV series that covers the events in that book. He apologized profusely to his fans, most of whom seemed to take it graciously, at least to his face. However, it spawned some heated discussions in the online communities that I frequent (most notably The Passive Voice) about the implicit contract between writers and reades.
This discussion is not new, even with regard to Mr. Martin. Way back in 2009, Neil Gaiman addressed this issue in a blog post where he stated quite memorably that “George R.R. Martin is not your bitch”:
People are not machines. Writers and artists aren’t machines.
You’re complaining about George doing other things than writing the books you want to read as if your buying the first book in the series was a contract with him: that you would pay over your ten dollars, and George for his part would spend every waking hour until the series was done, writing the rest of the books for you.
No such contract existed. You were paying your ten dollars for the book you were reading, and I assume that you enjoyed it because you want to know what happens next.
So that’s one end of the spectrum: that writing is an art, that it can’t be forced, that trying to force it is wrong, and that writers have no obligation to their readers to force anything. Readers should not stalk their favorite writers or tell them what they should or should not be doing to produce the next book. As Mr. Martin said in his latest post:
Unfortunately, the writing did not go as fast or as well as I would have liked. You can blame my travels or my blog posts or the distractions of other projects and the Cocteau and whatever, but maybe all that had an impact… you can blame my age, and maybe that had an impact too…but if truth be told, sometimes the writing goes well and sometimes it doesn’t, and that was true for me even when I was in my 20s.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have Larry Correia. Two days after Mr. Martin announced that The Winds of Winter would not be finished in time for the TV series, Mr. Correia announced his own plans for the year: which of his books are coming out, which books he plans to write, which project he’s going to collaborate on, and which conventions and events he will (or more notably, will not) be attending.
I don’t know whether he meant this as a dig at Mr. Martin specifically, but he included the following statement:
To all those sensitive artist types who whine about how they can’t rush art, and can’t get any writing done, oh, BS. Quit your crying, put your big girl panties on, and treat it like your job. Because it is a REAL JOB. And like all real jobs, if you don’t work then you shouldn’t GET PAID. So shut up, quit screwing around, and get back to work.
The part that really stood out to me, though, was his announcement that he would not be at DragonCon or GenCon this year:
I’m skipping DragonCon and GenCon this year, which pains me because I love those, but again, I’m trying to up the novel production, and all those cons in a row over the summer kick my butt.
I found it interesting because George R.R. Martin is well-known as a frequent convention attendee, to the point that by his own admission attending these conventions is his “way of life.” Larry Correia knows that his writing productivity takes a hit when he attends too many conventions, but George R.R. Martin either doesn’t know or has chosen to prioritize attending fannish events over his own writing.
This made me curious about Mr. Martin’s writing productivity, so I did a little digging and found the following figures, calculated by his fans:
Those numbers are rather stunning. He averaged only 200 words a day when writing A Dance with Dragons? Just for reference, this blog post is about seven hundred words so far, and I’m writing it while taking a break from my other writing (word count so far today: 1,100 words, and that’s a little low). Even if we allow for five drafts written at the same speed, five drafts still only comes to 1,000 words a day.
Now, I do think Mr. Gaiman makes a good point that it is neither healthy nor helpful to try and micromanage everything that a writer does. We can’t spend every waking hour working on the next book, and even if we did, it probably wouldn’t turn out as well, because refilling the creative well is an important part of the writing process. And I also have to admit that if you ran a similar calculation on my own books (especially the early ones), you would probably find some similarly embarrassing figures.
(Though to be fair to myself, I tend to have multiple irons in the fire at any given time, so a straight start date to publication date calculation doesn’t tell the whole story—and it probably doesn’t tell the whole story with George R.R. Martin as well. But still, even if those figures were twice as high, they would still be absurdly low for a working writer.)
When Mr. Gaiman and Mr. Martin say that the writing “comes when it comes” and there’s nothing they can do about it, I think they’re wrong. Dead wrong. Writing is an art, but it is also a craft. It can’t be forced, but it can be structured. Mr. Correia has evaluated how productively he writes and structured his convention-going plans accordingly. Has Mr. Martin?
I also think they’re dead wrong about the writer having no obligation to the reader. That’s total bunk. Reading is an act of collaboration between the writer and the reader: without readers, stories would never exist. They would just be markings on a page, or electrons on a drive, or at best ideas and daydreams in the writer’s head. If a tree falls in the forest, does it really make a sound? If a book is never opened, does it ever tell a story?
Part of this may be the difference in perspective between indie writers and traditionally published writers. In the traditional system, writers were paid an advance on royalties by their publishers. The contract also allowed for royalties, but those figures were set so low that most books never earned out their advance. Publishers made up for it by raising the advances for the writers they wanted to keep.
In contrast, indie writers live and die by their royalty checks. Had a good month? Congratulations, you can afford to eat. Had a bad month? Tsk, tsk. Better hurry up with that WIP of yours, because the longer it takes to publish it, the longer it takes for you to get paid.
But even for the fantastically successful writers who never have to worry about how they’ll pay their bills, I still believe that they have as much of an obligation to their readers as the rest of us. Without readers, we would not be able to do what we do. Without readers, it would be impossible to pursue writing as a career. We all want to live the dream, and the only way to do that is by treating our readers well.
So George R.R. Martin may not be your bitch, but I most certainly am. Writing is not something that happens only sometimes: it’s my job, and I do it every day. And as for accountability, I absolutely feel that I’m accountable to my readers. They are the whole reason I am able to do this in the first place. If that makes me their bitch, then so be it.
Wow, even on my bad days I trump 600 words,…. that can’t be right!
Peter Hamilton wrote his 1.2 million word Night’s Dawn novel in the space of a few years. Martin is up to 1.7 million over a quarter century. People are going to make of that what they will, and much of it is going to be uncomplimentary towards Martin since no one has ever hemmed and hawed a novel like he has. It is an historic non-achievement.
Even worse, Martin now seems bent on setting yet another precedent: letting his own series be subverted into nothing more than movie tie-in novels by letting events overtake him. What that essentially means is we may never see how the series was originally meant to end; a fitting fate all things considered. Normally in such a situation there would then be a “director’s cut” as it were and two versions of the last two books, since I assume Martin has his novels outlined and knows who ends up where. But given Martin’s age, any such project will have to be taken up as a post-mortem ala Tolkien. Seeing as how this all results in ways to squeeze extra cash from fans I doubt book publishers are unhappy about the turn of events.
A sad and unnecessary fate for what was for 4 books the finest epic fantasy ever written by an American in the 4 decades since Americans have taken up that form in earnest. It’s not a question of being anyone’s bitch, but expectations based on the past professionalism of authors to finish what they started and in a timely fashion. In that respect Martin is either in first or last place depending how you look at it, neither of them good.
The truth is Martin let his series get away from him by the simple plot flaw of not thinking out how to solve how fast dragons can age. He went against his own decision to not write the planned bridge, got caught up in conventions and merchandising and using his fame to sell second-rate projects and suddenly realized you can’t go home again. He was in the zone, let himself cool down when he was ahead on points and got knocked out in the 12th round.
The buzz of cultural and personal background informs art. Asking Martin to write as the man he was in the late ’90s is like asking Gil Elvgren to paint ’50s pin ups or Heinlein to write early ’40s-style work long after the energy of those eras and what drove those men was spent. There’s a reason Led Zeppelin went south with their 5th (or 4th?) album and that’s because what informed their music no longer existed. The end result is the best one can hope for is to create empty caricatures of one’s own older work much as has happened with Spielberg, the second Star Wars trilogy and arguably even to Jack McDevitt and Peter Hamilton.
Strike while the iron is hot boys, or pull out a pair of ruby slippers. And sometimes people just get burned out and no longer have anything to say as artists but are still very financially viable, with predictably stupid results. They essentially become nostalgia acts before they retire. See: The Rolling Stones and The Who.
Wow, very thoughtful and articulate. I think, however, with writing you get better the more you do it so I don’t think he cant crank out good stuff because he’s old. However, he isn’t prioritizing his work over the social scene and it is effecting things. And his efficiency numbers seem off. I also think the world of eBooks changed the market and probably swept the rug out from under him. Without Kindle etc allowing Indies to thrive, would we be here? Probably not.
I don’t think James was talking about age so much as about the time of writing. Does anyone thing ADWD would have involved Dany getting bogged down in an Iraq War metaphor if the book had been written earlier?
That said, I’m increasingly coming round to the opinion that GRRM has lost interest but doesn’t want to admit to having lost interest. I’d have more respect for him if he admitted that he just didn’t care about finishing the series any more.
Forgive my not being in the know, but isn’t part of writing drawing on your world? Iraq as a metaphor makes sense given when he’s writing. I’d be more surprised if it wasn’t there…
As for not caring, you might be right…. and that’s just sad.
That’s right, Frances. I don’t think age has anything to do with it, but rather where you are as an artist. In fact I think it’s Martin’s working in the trenches for years as it were which allowed him to finally hit his stride and produce something of a masterpiece when C. L. Moore, Van Vogt and Asimov wrote signature work in their mid-’20s. If I’m correct, the current problem is a matter of not staying in stride, not age. If some mysterious not easily defined or replaceable muse were not a part of art, everyone would be cranking out great stuff at will, but that’s rather rare. It seems enthusiasm is a crucial factor when it comes to sheer artistry, but at some point a professional writer must produce at will. It’s all a mysterious process with a few common denominators but with maybe as many solutions as there are authors.
What seems to be the case is we’ve had some great authors who tapped into that part of themselves which is unique and who had a lot to say before they burned out or were no longer informed by the whatever perfect storm produced them in the first place.
Burroughs, Heinlein and Bradbury went on quarter century runs of rather amazing consistency. C. Ashton Smith, Howard, Lovecraft and Vance also seemed to have few weak spots in their work once they got up and running. I don’t think Martin is the eccentric artist those folks are. He is a tank to their race horses. But like American method actors compared to the higher workman-like consistency of British actors, tanks tend to produce that one great signature work, but also higher failure rates. Brando, De Niro and Pacino hit higher notes; Caine, Guiness and Hoskins deliver more often, but not as great. These are huge generalities with obvious exceptions but I think you understand what I’m getting at.
What happened to C. S. Friedman after her great debut space opera In Conquest Born? She has never hit that note again. By the time she came back to a sequel there was nothing there. What happened with Dune? Why did Christopher Rowley write 2 really fine SF novels with The War for Eternity and The Black Ship and then lose his grip? Why did Van Vogt and Bester fall down? Too long away? I have no answers to that but the questions are intriguing.
As far as Dany getting stuck in an Iraq war metaphor…I’m fully convinced that Martin never intended to write the story of what happened to Dany in Mereen. The reason he had her stay there and “learn how to be a queen” was that he intended for there to be a 5 year gap between the end of the 3rd book and the start of the 4th, he did want to write about her returning to the Free Cities and meeting Ilyrio again, and he needed some reason why that meeting wasn’t going to happen during the gap between books. When the 5 year gap went away, however, he suddenly needed to describe what was happening with her and her attempts to become queen. He flailed about for a plot and ended up pulling in what was bothering him about the real world at the time. I found it jarring and ended up quitting the series over it, but of course YMMV.
I think I agree with you that he’s lost interest. I think it happened around the end of the third book. He doesn’t really know what’s going to happen next, the writing’s become a chore, and he’d rather just abandon this particular fic and start something else, but of course that’s much harder when you’re a professional with a contract as opposed to some kid on fanfiction.net…
What does YMMV stand for?
Your Mileage May Vary
Not to mention, millions of people waiting for your next book. One of the reasons why I’m not too keen on starting a massive series of chihuahua-killing tomes, and prefer to write in nonlinear series or interconnected standalones with my longer books.
Someone with much more knowledge of the books than me pointed out during the Dance gap that half the storylines (Dany, Jon, Bran mostly) plateau at the end of ASOS, and lend themselves to picking up after a timeskip with the characters having levelled up; but others (Cersei, Tyrion) end in cliffhangers and sort of need an immediate resolution, so the 5 year gap or not was always a bit of a trap.
But what makes Dany’s storyline so clunky is that it contradicts the message of the previous book. In ASOS she learns that her attempts to skip merrily through the world setting it to rights has caused all manner of chaos, and decides to stick around in Meereen with the implied message of responsibility and owning the consequences of your actions. In ADWD it turns out that trying to take responsibility is the worst thing she could have done, either for herself or the Meereenese. Which you can praise as a deconstruction of something or other or you can say that it’s incoherent.
It’s come to my attention that GRRM has written and published a lot of other stuff while writing ASOIAF, something I wasn’t aware of as I don’t follow him closely. That’s probably the most legitimate counterargument to the low productivity demonstrated by the table (which again, I didn’t make—I picked it up from a GRRM fan forum). The next question in my mind is whether his non-ASOIAF writing is equal in quantity over the same period as his ASOIAF writing. Even assuming that it is, that would only double the figures in the table, which as I’ve mentioned above would still leave them absurdly low for a working writer.
I do not begrudge Mr. Martin any of his success. As I’ve written at length before, his ASOIAF books are not my personally taste in fantasy, but I have read A Game of Thrones and found it to be extremely well-written, with some excellent world-building and a very immersive fantasy world. I can appreciate his genius: the comparisons to J.R.R. Tolkien are well-founded.
As a young writer with a fledgling career, though, his apparent lack of self-discipline really pushes me to get my act together. In particular, his admission that it was like this for him even back in his 20s sends chills down my back, because I can see some of that in myself. If I don’t take make an effort to structure my writing time, then it really does “come when it comes,” as he says. When I do provide that discipline and structure, though, my productivity goes up significantly—and so does the quality.
As a part time writer with a day job it is incredible tempting, whenever I would rather play world of tanks or waste two hours browsing the internet, to say that I just don’t have the inspiration to do any writing. And yet, those times when I force myself to actually get my arse in gear it turns out I do have something to write, after all.