EricNoah said:
Writing isn't like making something on an assembly line -- you do it as inspiration strikes. I have confidence his muse will return in time.
Respectfully, I disagree. You do it as inspiration strikes when it's your hobby, the thing you do to get away from the real world and escape for a little while into flights of fantasy.
If you want it to be the thing you do for a living, you're much better off treating it like a professional treats his job.
If I go to my boss and say, "Boss, I'm just not feeling the muse speaking to me today about the copy I'm supposed to produce for our newsletter, which needs to go out to the printer on the 16th so that it can come back by the 27th and then get out to the post office bulk mail department by the 30th," my boss will respectfully tell me to get my act together and produce the darn copy. Or, if she's feeling charitable, she'll say, "Alright, then ditch that for today. Instead, write up the new website article you were going to put together, and come back to the newsletter tomorrow."
I don't mean to be deliberately argumentative -- GRRM has enough money that he certainly isn't in danger of losing his home or anything. He can afford to not write for the rest of his life, if he does not feel the pull of the muse. But from a professional perspective, he's well past the "whetting our appetite" point and into the "people are moving on with their lives and might not pick it up when it does come out, or might have grown enough in the five-plus years that they will have issues they didn't have before" stage. He's free to do so -- he's had a long and distinguished career, and it's not like he's seriously hurting himself by taking so long -- but this doesn't deserve the "oh, writing is art, and you can't put a timeline on art" speech, in my opinion.
I make time to write at night after getting home. I sit my butt down and do it. If the muse isn't there, I do it anyway. If I physically can't, then I work on another scene, or another writing project. And no, I don't have a zero percent failure rate, no argument there, but I'm doing it in addition to working a forty-hour-a-week job and having the requisite life stresses.
If my persistence combines with luck to the point where someday I don't need to work a day job, where writing
is my day job, well, I'm fairly certain that even with liberties taken for beach days or Farscape marathons, I'll still be able to crank out without five year gaps between books. I've cranked out three novels since reading the last GRRM book, and that's with moving twice, going through unemployment depression (and not writing), moving through several different jobs, working three part-time jobs simultaneously to help make ends meet, and supporting my wife through her pregnancy. They ain't published as of yet, so the only difference between me and any other wannabe writer is that I've got three of them out there waiting to hit that jackpot -- but the difference between me and GRRM is that I'm actually completing my stuff.
Again, like I said -- GRRM is free to take five years to get things done, if the story he needs to tell demands that. Good for him. I can't wait until I've got people willing to defend me taking five-plus years to complete a novel when that's my day job. But I think the myth of the muse serves to keep a lot of promising writing hobbyists as hobbyists instead of professionals. It's a bad example to set.
