A Song of Ice and Fire Update

[Eosin the Red]

I don't do it for a living. I haven't sold a novel. In the pro-writing world, I am a tiny tiny fish. That said, I've got a lot more experience at it than you do, so yes, essentially, relative to you, I am an expert, and you are wrong.

I would say that you are a puffed up little fish. I have submitted to professional magazines and have science credits to my name. So what....That does not make an opinon any more valid. A claim to credentials to "prove" the validity of your argument falls flat into the realm of the unmentionable.

Try coming down and chatting with the rest of us, instead of lording all high and mighty, Mr Professional Writer.

PS - When you can bank one of the most popular series in fiction, you can say anything you please. You can even use the F-word in Dragon. You can even have a 200 page bath scene with Elayne because ...... well, because you can cause you the man. Until for some reason you aint the man. You can have long delays between books, heck, you can even write books between book 10 and 11 that have nothing to do with the series. You know why? Cause you the Man. You generate money. The Sugar Daddy. Mr Moneybanks. You can do what you please until you ain't Mr Moneybanks.

 

[fusangite]

Taykris,

You seem to be working from three assumptions I would question:
(a) all writers write the same way, experience the same difficulties and overcome them in largely the same way with the same degree of success
(b) writers' block is a myth despite the fact that there are hundreds and hundreds of writers far more prolific than you who write about it and comprehend it as a real phenomenon
(c) the process of writing a novel is just the same as writing an equal volume of short stories

You might want to check those assumptions with others in your fields to see how broadly they are shared.

 

[takyris]

Hey, Eosin,

Hey, personal attacks, great. He asked me if I thought my opinion counted for more than his because I have pro credits and he doesn't actually write at all, as far as he's stated. I said yes. This is not unlike arguing a point about architecture with an architect and then taking offense when the architect then says, "Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I do think I am more qualified to have an opinion than you are." I could still be wrong, but, well, in this particular field (that is, the process of fiction-writing), I appear to have more experience than he does, so the odds are in my favor. I have no idea what you do for a living, but if I came up to you and said, "Hey, I know I have no idea what this is all about, but..." and then said a common and faintly patronizing misconception about your field of work, what would you do? I'm not angry at Umbran. If Umbran wants to disagree with me, go him.

But when I post a disclaimer saying "I am by no means terribly important -- but I do have some pro sales and SFWA membership, and here's what I think", and you take that as your opening to make a personal attack, I don't really see what that gets you. If I'm bursting your bubbles by trying to state an opinion from a semi-professional standpoint, I'm terribly sorry.

Submitting your work to professional markets is slightly different than being accepted and published in them. Submitting articles is slightly different than submitting fiction (I have a whopping one pro-level article publication). But good luck nevertheless. Anybody willing to play rejection-letter roulette is good people in my book.

As for your not-attacking-me point, I agree completely. As long as your stories rock and you rake in the ducats, you can do whatever you want. That said, I think that GRRM runs the risk of losing the ducat-raking potential if he stretches this out much longer.

Fusangite:

a) All writers write the same: I don't think that. My writing buddies write a lot differently than I write. However, I do think that all, or at least most, successful writers treat writing as a craft, as well as an art, even if they don't think of it in those terms. They're aiming for beauty and perfection, sure, but they're also aiming to crank out a good first draft that follows the plot that they outlined and which they can then polish and tweak until it works and gets across all that beauty they wanted to achieve. Or that doesn't follow any plot outline, but which they can then tweak as needed to make work. Or something along those lines. Barring Heinlein literalists, almost everyone agrees that it's good to get a rough draft down, then revise and edit and tune until it's perfect. Just about every writer does that (at least until they're so huge and rich that they don't have to do so, at which point their writing usually begins to get bloated and bad).

b) Writer's Block is completely and utterly real. No problem there. On the other hand, if I were GRRM and had his resources as well as, what, two years? Three years? To get the next one cranked out, I'd probably have figured out a way around it by now. There are methods. There are ways. They range from cute writing exercises to writing individual scenes (which is what it sounds like he's trying to do) to going to the spa and getting an herbal treatment to exorcise your stress. If you have money and time, you can get through writer's block. Up to a certain point, I am extremely sympathetic to people with writer's block. Past that point, it begins to feel like a cop-out. If you're not interested in the world anymore, or if you've written yourself into a corner, go write about something else. I believe that Eddings started writing his Diamond Throne series while still working on the Mallorean, alternating the books. The world didn't seem to end. If GRRM needs to write something else for awhile, he should do so. He shouldn't just sit around complaining about his writer's block after three years, though. And he isn't, I should note. He's not making a plea for sympathy. I'm not commenting on him. I'm commenting on the people leaping to his defense with claims that he's got writer's block and that I should treat this as a congenital illness over which he has no control and for which he is in no way responsible.

c) I've written novels. I've written many novels. Many of them I wrote when I was young and had no talent, and so they will never come out of the drawer. On the other hand, in terms of novels that actually count and, you know, have a chance at being published, I've got one at Daw, one waiting for a final revision as soon as I get enough input from my writing buddies, and one that I should be working on right now. I didn't bring them up because my earlier point was that I had had stuff published, and bringing up my unpublished novels in that context would have been somewhat disingenuous. On the other hand, since the question here is not whether I have published but whether I have written, I can safely say that I understand how the process of writing, receiving critiques on, rewriting, receiving more critiques on, revising (which in my purely arbitrary distinction is more of a fine-tuning process than rewriting), receiving yet more critiques on, and finally line-editing the last polished copy of the novel works. The first (non-sucky) novel took me a year to get through that process, but it's short -- probably about half of a GRRM novel in length. The second is longer and has taken me about two years. The third, I started yesterday. We'll see how it goes. The process is hard. The process is not glorious. The process is not nearly as much fun as receiving massive paychecks and flying all your friends to Switzerland for the weekend to go skiing. But many people do it while working full-time jobs.

Above and beyond my selfish desire to, you know, read the next book, I'm worried that GRRM has had this massive fanbase for too long -- that he's gotten halfway out there on the tightrope and then looked down and seen how far he could fall if things go wrong. I have no evidence of that, mind you. I have nothing at all to back that up. Maybe he's just been spending the money we all gave him. Maybe he's been working on other stuff under a different name. Who knows?

 

[Berandor]

There are other pro writers around here, many of whom are pretty big fish. They're welcome to come tell me that I'm full of it.

Well, I'm no big fish - not yet - but here's my two cents.

You're right. Writing is a craft, and one the good days, it becomes art. When I feel inspired, the words flow, and it's an exhilarating experience. But when I don't feel like it, I still have to write. And it can be very hard. You don't get the right words, grasping ideas is like catching fish bare-handed, ...

I also think, however, that you can learn the motions of writing, but the spirit of it only to a degree. So you can learn to write entertainingly, and you well should, but the story you tell has to come from yourself. I also think that the harder it was to write something, the more it must be revised.

Anyway, just to show you you're not totally alone here.

All I hope is that GRRM doesn't die of old age before the books are finished.

 

[Celtavian]

re

Writing is not an art. It's a craft. The difference is that, while both can be beautiful, one of them actually requires discipline and practice and daily work and such.

This is the statement that caused people to take offense. Even from my standpoint, it makes a differentiation that seems to demean art as requiring less "discipline and practice". That is just not the case.

Artists put as much work in as any writer to be good. Writing is no more or less difficult than other forms of art or craft. It takes years to master either. There are countless artists who do volumes of preparatory work prior to starting a final work.

 

[takyris]

Celtavian: And then, in several later posts, I revised my statement to remove the ambiguity I'd put in there.

I wasn't implying that singers and painters and sculpters aren't craftspeople. I was trying (and obviously failing dramatically) to imply that anyone who does any of that as a professional has to become a craftsperson.

My wife is a singer. She gets extremely annoyed when doe-eyed young women say that she must have a lot of artistic spirit to sing as well as she does, and that they want to sing when they retire -- as though my wife's performance were completely the result of a muse bopping her with a magic wand instead of, say, putting in several hours of practice per week and paying hundreds of dollars per month on voice lessons and then singing to me late at night in an abandoned parking lot because it's the only place where she can actually go full-voice on the high notes. Yeah, the art is there, and it can be beautiful -- but to do it as more than a diverting hobby requires an element of craftsmanship or professionalism or dedication or whatever you want to call it.

 

[Endur]

I think there are really two issues why the book isn't finished right now.

The first reason is that Martin didn't intend to write this book initially. He intended to skip these years and cover them only through flashbacks and memories.

So, his released chapters are probably converted from some of the more dramatic flashbacks he had originally intended to include. The other chapters may be stuff he didn't intend to cover originally and he had to create over the last three years.

The second reason is that Martin is now famous within the scifi-fantasy community. Best selling author, etc. He gets invited to cons and parties all over the place. Editors invite him to contribute short stories to anthologies. Companies want to make games and comic books and toys based on his novels. Script writers approach him about making a movie.

And so on and so forth.

So Martin has many more distractions today than when he was a struggling author.

Its the same reason why super-bowl teams in the NFL so rarely repeat. Even if you are the best team in the NFL, after you win you have so many distractions that you lose some of your edge and a lot of your time, which means some other team will most likely defeat you.

 

[Beretta]

The second reason is that Martin is now famous within the scifi-fantasy community. Best selling author, etc. He gets invited to cons and parties all over the place. Editors invite him to contribute short stories to anthologies. Companies want to make games and comic books and toys based on his novels. Script writers approach him about making a movie.

I think you have it there. At one time he could concentrate on his writing. Now his time is split between Q&A, consistency and royalties meetings etc etc. Collectible card games, board games - even if your not designing them, you'd want a hand in anything that is using your 'brand' to sell, and it all eats into your time.

As for me, I have not read anything in the Fantasy genre as good as GRRM's books thus far (I'm not that well-read I guess). But still, it serves to explain why I would wait for however long it takes for the next book to come out so long as there would be no drop in the quality because of that. I would rather wait and be rewarded with a great story, rather than get it on time and be subjected to anything equivalent to a "Jordanesque" style of novel.

PS I struggled to get through Book 1 of Jordan's WoT - it was just that boring. They are a popular series so I persisted with Books 2 & 3 because I figured that they must get better. Oops! There's several hours of my life that I won't be getting back... I tip my hat to anyone who has reached Book 10.

 

[DMScott]

I hate to be critical, but I swear Robert Jordan could have summarized this series into one compact 300 page book.

I think it would've made a pretty nice trilogy. Reading "Eye of the World" - where the heroes meet each other, discover their special powers, travel thousands of miles overcoming many foes, and face down an ancient prophecy - shows a huge contrast to what the series has become. If Jordan wrote EOTW at his current narrative pace, it'd be at least six books, probably more. Somewhere along the line, he (and his agent and publisher, no doubt) figured out that people will buy his books no matter what he puts in them. And so he no longer seems to care what kind of dreck he churns out.

I don't think Martin will go down that road, but I am a little worried. The first trilogy didn't end so much as stop, it'd be easy for him to keep on writing every little thing that happens between the first and second trilogies. I kinda wish he'd parked everybody in a reasonably stable place and state and then said "OK, five years pass", to avoid the temptation to fill the bridging book with minutiae. As it is, a lot of characters ended the first trilogy in a transition state, which means readers want to know what happens to them next, which means Martin is tempted to write what happens next even if it isn't that important to the narrative, which increases the odds of us eventually getting "Crossroads of Ice and Fire"...

 

[jdavis]

I think it would've made a pretty nice trilogy. Reading "Eye of the World" - where the heroes meet each other, discover their special powers, travel thousands of miles overcoming many foes, and face down an ancient prophecy - shows a huge contrast to what the series has become. If Jordan wrote EOTW at his current narrative pace, it'd be at least six books, probably more. Somewhere along the line, he (and his agent and publisher, no doubt) figured out that people will buy his books no matter what he puts in them. And so he no longer seems to care what kind of dreck he churns out.

Jordan got his fans to start with because the first books were good and had some real unique points in them, then I guess he got the big head, but you can really tell when things went downhill is when his wife became his editor, it's almost like there is no editor at all anymore, Book 7 and book 8 should of been one book (book 7) and book 9 and 10 should of been one book (book 8), he's managed to pad this whole thing out by 2 extra books (they sell for about $30 a piece in hardback, you do the math). Book 10 was so bad even us die hard fanatics were left scratching our heads, I mean he's not even trying anymore it's all padding, the whole book pads out one chapter of actual worth. Jordan doesn't have a clue where to go with this story, he's just writing off the top of his head to keep it alive and selling.

Martin has jet to pad out or stretch out anything, he's done a good job keeping on track (want to bet he has the whole series already outlined from beginning to end?). I think where he has problems with this book is that he didn't intend to write it to start with, he's obviously got several parts he wanted to show in their own book but he probably has several big blank sections he never meant to fill in to start with to worry about. It's obvious he wants this book to be of the quality of the other books or else he would of just gotten something out there (it would of sold whether it was good or not, just like Crossroads of Twilight did). Heck your only as good as your last book, I got a felling Jordan's going to have problems getting his next book to sell like the others did, I'm sure Martin is aware of that.