George R.R. Martin | A Dance with Dragons
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Welcome to the Talks at Google podcast, where great minds meet. I'm Kyle, bringing you this week's episode with author George R. R. Martin. Talks at Google brings the world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place. You can watch every episode at youtube.com/talksatgoogle. George R. R. Martin is an author and a television producer and writer.

He is most famous for his series "A Song of Ice and Fire," which was then adapted by HBO into the overwhelmingly popular television drama "Game of Thrones." In 2017, Time magazine dubbed him "an American Tolkien." He joins Google for a Q&A session and to share more about his novel "A Dance with Dragons." Originally published in August of 2011, here is George R.R. Martin, "A Dance with Dragons."

Ladies and gentlemen, the man who's given us one of the best fantasy series of all time, one of the most compelling reasons to watch television today, and the man who made it acceptable for nerds to talk about fantasy in public again. Please join me in welcoming George R. R. Martin. Thank you all. It's a thrill to be here. This is quite a kick for me. I'm on my book tour now for Dance with Dragons and

visiting a city a day. It's sort of a blur where I am right now, but I've done many events. This is the first time I've done one like this. However, where most of the audience seems to have computers in their laps, that's sort of intimidating. But interesting, very interesting. So it's...

You know, I came out of the world of science fiction. I wrote a lot of science fiction early in my career. And I've always gone back and forth with other science fiction writers about whether fantasy and science fiction are, in fact, two different flavors of the same thing, which is my contention, or whether they're absolute polar opposites. And fantasy is corrupting the precious bodily fluids of science fiction, which is the contention of others. And I think the fact that I'm here at this

campus devoted to the world of computers and the cutting edge of tomorrow and you're all fantasy geeks is proof that I'm right. And it's all one big thing. - Thank you for coming, George. We really appreciate it. And a token of our appreciation on behalf of the whole project team presented by the person who designed these fine t-shirts that we're wearing. - Oh, thank you, thank you very much. - And we do expect you to wear it on your next television appearance. - Oh, okay.

So, for everyone in attendance and the folks on the stream, we have taken the most popular questions from the YouTube page, the moderated page, and from internal Googlers. And we'll be going through those questions today. One of the guiding principles we have, since a lot of the folks here are going to be new to the series and know it either from television or from just reading the first book, is we're not going to ask any questions that touch on content matter beyond A Game of Thrones. So, even if your question got bumped up, unfortunately, we may not be asking it today.

So with that, we have a question from Jigger444. You mentioned you had trouble cutting down some of the Arya chapters for A Dance with Dragons. Would you ever post the unused material on your website? Um, no, probably not.

I do save everything when I cut material, I do save it because I may find a place for it later and there are things that you know I cut out of the second book that I find a place for in the fourth book and that sort of thing is constantly going on but I'm still carrying forward material that I cut from the first book. Some of it as short as a single pithy sentence that I particularly liked but no longer fit and others

half chapters of that that I took out. And maybe I'll find a place for that, but I have a feeling that much of that and more will still be in my files when the whole series is done. But I don't know if I ever wanted getting out there. It's, you know, taken out for a reason. There's one chapter from the new book, from Dance with Dragons, that I...

This does go beyond Game of Thrones, but I'll be vague. There's this Tyrion chapter that drove me crazy all through the...

decade it seemed that I worked on Death with Dragons, Precursor Feast for Crows, where I kept putting it in and then taking it out and then putting it in and then taking it out and then I put it in as a dream sequence and then I took it out and then I made it a series of recurring dreams, each one going slightly further so I put it in seven chapters and then I took it out of those seven chapters.

It's one of those chapters that I think is, by itself, is a terrific chapter. I liked the way it came together. It's vivid, it's kind of spooky, it's got some really great visual imagery in it, and it leads me absolutely down a dead end, where if I take that path, I'm kind of stuck on a detour, and so I had to take it out. That chapter I may, I don't know, publish at some point down the road, but not most of the other material. Great.

So the next one is a multi-part question and it came up a lot on the public site and there are also some Googler questions around it as well. Have you ever, and this comes from somebody whose name I can't pronounce in Vancouver, have you ever been influenced by some of the crazy theories your fans come up with for mysteries in the books? Have you ever changed an aspect of your story based on fan feedback, i.e. if one of their theories is better than what you originally planned? No.

But I am concerned about that possibility, which is one of the reasons I don't tend to read the fan boards.

I mean, when the first fan boards started occurring and they started theorizing and analyzing books in such detail, and I'm going back now to the mid-90s really when the first boards appeared. Dragonstone coming out of Australia that Peter Gibran I think was the first board I was aware of and a couple others came up after that. I was very flattered and I did read all the theories and then precisely this point occurred where it says, you know,

What if they're guessing the things that I haven't revealed yet? What if they guessed them correctly? How does that affect me? Do I then say, "Oh my god, they figured it out already. I better change it." Or do I just ignore it and plow ahead? And what if they come up with better ideas than the ones I had? Do I steal them?

And I didn't like any of these possibilities. So I said it would be better for me to try to keep my distance and not go on these boards and try to--. It's a futile effort because people also write me emails and people come to public forums like this and they come up to me at signings and whisper their theories in my ear and things like that. So I am kind of aware of some of the speculation out there. But I try to keep my distance from it precisely because I don't want to be

I mean, you know, it's one of the drawbacks of the whole internet culture in this world that you guys have created. That something that previously maybe one reader in a thousand would have guessed, but you still had the other 999 who would have no inkling until you reveal it in a book.

Now, that one person in a thousand puts it on an internet message board and everybody sees it and they say, oh yeah, yeah, that's right. Now I see the clues. I got it. And pretty soon, half...

the readership, or at least the internet-savvy portion of your readership knows it. But what do you do then? Do you change it and come up with something goofy and outlandish that you haven't led the... you haven't done the foreshadowing for, that you haven't laid the foundation for, just in order to surprise people? I mean, sure, I could have, like, aliens come down, and that would certainly surprise the hell out of everybody. No one is predicting that, but it would ruin the series, so...

So, basically you can't let yourself be influenced by this stuff and I try not to. Great. So, Rita Meyer who is a Googler asked, "As a sub-question, with the books now being adapted for a successful TV series that you also write for, do you think this will have an influence on the decisions and choices you make in the novels?"

Well, once again, no. I hope not. The novels are novels. The TV series is the TV series. And they're two different beasts. The TV series is very faithful so far. I do write for a series. I do one episode per season. I'm also co-executive producer on the series. I have a great relationship with David Benioff and Dan Weiss, who are the showrunners and the main writers on the series.

But ultimately that's that's their baby and the books are my baby and there is the possibility that as faithful as we've started out and as faithful as we intend to be that Changes will come into effect what I call the butterfly effect is

Which I'm sure, you know, being the audience you are, you all understand because you've read Ray Bradbury's The Sound of Thunder, you know? You step on a butterfly in the Pleistocene and it seems very minor but suddenly you return to the future and all of human history has changed because of that butterfly. A small change.

can produce large changes later on. And that's a question on the show. I mean, we've already seen in the first season, as faithful as it was, at least two significant departures. One character who has...

his tongue torn out with hot pincers, who later in my books, that doesn't happen to him and he's around and gets involved pretty seriously in some stuff in book three. He's not going to be around to do that. So David and Dan are going to have to remove that stuff or create a new character or somehow address that problem. Similarly, the great scene in book one

or in the first season where Khal Drogo confronts the man Mago and the Dothraki blood rider and rips out his tongue. Terrific scene, completely made up by largely by Jason Momoa and by Dan and David. It doesn't happen in my books. Mago is still alive in the books.

and still has yet to be dealt with. So, these kind of butterfly effect things may produce changes down the road, but I mean, what am I gonna do? Go back and retroactively rewrite book one? Maybe I should. That throat scene was great, but... No, I can't let myself be affected. I am aware of what they're doing in the show. I advise Dan and David whenever they're about to hit the butterfly effect and sometimes

They change according to that and sometimes they plunge ahead. So the two beasts are the two beasts and each one is separate from the other. Okay. So coming from Tenati in Slovenia, what was your favorite and well now we know this, what was your favorite and least favorite scene in HBO's Game of Thrones? My favorite scene, well this of course, I suppose everybody's seen the series now. I don't have to worry about giving things away but...

My favorite scene had to be the end of episode 9, the execution of Ned. I thought they did that very powerfully. It was not precisely as described in the books, but...

It was certainly moving and evocative. The director did a great job on it. The scriptwriters did a great job. They added a wonderful grace note, which is when Ned is being led up to the stairs where he sees Arya and he says to Euron of the Night's Watch as he passes him, he says, Baelor, to...

set in motion, you're in saving Arya, which is not in the books. In the books, Euron just spots her on his own and takes his own initiative. But it was a great idea to give that little moment, that one last kind of heroic act by Ned. So I love that. I love what they did with that moment. But there are a lot of great scenes that I love. The final scene with Dany, the season closing episode, which I was in

considerable trepidation about because you know how good were the dragons going to be that's a big CGI thing and We're you know it's a it's a reality of television today That television has become so good and the technical standards of television have become so good that a large portion of the audience is judging us on the basis of what they're seeing on major motion pictures and

So we always have to run the risk of, you know, if we do CGI, people say, well, it's not as good as what I saw in Lord of the Rings or in the latest, you know, big budget science fiction picture. And it's so frustrating because, of course, those shows have immensely more time than we do and they have budgets that are 10, 20, 100 times our budget. And, you know, there was a time when the audience made that distinction. They did not expect...

the chase scene on an episode of T.J. Hooker to match what they would see in Bullet or The French Connection or a major motion picture cop scene at the time. But now they do expect it and it's a challenge for our special effects guys and our technical guys to live up to. We have a very sizable budget for a television show but it's still a television budget and it's not a feature film budget.

So we're always having to wrestle with that. Least favorite scene? You know, I don't know that I really have one. I suppose my least favorite scene that actually appeared on camera would be the hunting scene where Robert is boar hunting because, you know, there was like Robert and Renly and Barristan were sort of tromping through the woods alone and I talked to Dan and Dave and said, you know, there should be like

100 other guys and horses and tents and when the king goes hunting, it's not like, "Okay, I'm walking through the woods with a spear here." And they don't disagree with that. They said, "Yeah, we would have liked all that stuff too." But once again, it's budget. We had an hour to shoot that scene and our horse budget was exhausted for the season.

So, there we were. So, you know, it's the realities. I mean, the great thing about writing books as I do now is that my budget is unlimited. I can write anything that I can think of and I'm limited only by the size of my imagination and by the size of the imagination of my readers. But when you translate it to television and film,

you have the realities not only of the budget which I've mentioned but also the shooting schedule. You know, you have to keep on schedule and if you have a lot of trouble getting the scene you were supposed to shoot in the morning, that gives you less time to shoot the scene in the afternoon but you can't slop over to the next day or you start getting a rolling effect and you fall further and further behind your shooting schedule and then you're more and more over budget and it becomes a mess.

All of that impacts too, and this is all the kind of behind the scenes I don't know technical stuff that really the viewers should not have to worry about it's the viewers really should just have to view the final product but um Nonetheless for for those of us concerned with behind the scenes stuff. It's a reality of life Well the actual thing I mean for the most part I loved I

All the scenes that were in the books that they translated to the TV show, I think they did all of those great. I also loved the vast majority of the new scenes that they did. If I have any quibbles with the show, and they are quibbles, very minor thing, it was the missing scenes, the scenes that weren't there at all. As I watched the show, frequently I would find myself thinking, "Oh, okay, now they're getting up to this scene. That's really good. I can't-- Oh, they didn't have that scene. They skipped over that scene."

Some of them were scenes that I had seen the actors do in auditions. They had been scenes that actually had helped the actors get their roles. So I really expected them, because I already knew, "Oh, the actor will do this great." I saw them do it in an audition, you know, sitting in a room in front of a curtain, and now I'm going to get to see them do it in costume on the set, and then, oh, it's not there. So I would have loved to have two more hours to have a 12-episode season instead of 10.

And of course to have you know an extra 50 million dollars, but but who of us wouldn't want an extra 50 million dollars They did do a great job. Yeah as a fan when your only complaint is that cereal has here and that one guy looks like Orlando Bloom We get a fair amount of people who are upset about no purple eyes - yes, I get that why aren't their eyes purple well I

try wearing purple contacts to see how you like it. So Dan, we have some Googler questions that were collected through Google Moderator, and we'll kick off with one of these right now. This one's from Peter in San Francisco. He writes, the sex, nudity, violence, and gore in the HBO series, so continuing with our previous question, has been very much like the books. It preserved a similar feel. Could you please discuss the creative process around the inclusion of this mature content?

Was there any pressure to tone it up or down? Well, of course, there was no pressure on me because I'm hardly involved. I mean, I am basically a consultant who writes one episode per season. And so whether there was pressure on Dan and Dave to go one way or another, I really don't know. If so, they didn't share it with me. You know, we did make some decisions early on.

that we wanted to include that material. And the biggest one is where we took the show. When Dan and Dave and I decided that we would do this project together and I attached them, we discussed this at some length and said, "We have to go. HBO was our first choice and pretty much our only choice. If HBO had said no or they weren't interested, yeah, we could have gone to another couple of our cable outlets." But I think we were all agreed right from the beginning

that we weren't going to go to traditional networks, ABC or CBS or NBC or any of those, simply because they would have made us remove all of that material. Everything would have been gone and, you know, much toned down violence, no sex whatsoever, or just sort of a few hints of sex, certainly no inappropriate sex. And, you know, a fantasy series,

they would have slaughtered us as an 8 o'clock show. I mean, I've been through this in my Hollywood years. I worked 10 years in Hollywood from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s, and I worked on a couple shows, Twilight Zone, the Twilight Zone revival, and Beauty and the Beast, both of which were 8 o'clock shows, you know, despite the fact...

On both shows we kept saying we don't want to be an 8 o'clock show. We want to be like a 9 o'clock or a 10 o'clock show because the standards and practices, the censorship things are a little looser there and you can do a little more.

material and and you know the network guys would promise us all what we know that way we really think of you as an adult show not a kiddie show but you know we have no room on a schedule so well will put you as a eight o'clock show but will treat you as a nine o'clock show and then we would be put as an eight o'clock show and and those guys who were the programming guys

would suddenly no longer be around and instead we'd be dealing with standards and practices guys who were censors who would say, "I don't care what programming told you, you're an 8 o'clock show and these are our 8 o'clock standards." So we made a decision right away, we're gonna go with HBO. HBO has that kind of stuff whether it's a 7 o'clock show, an 8 o'clock show, a 5:30 show, they don't care.

You know, you're signing up for HBO, you're paying a subscription, you know what you're getting. And what you're getting is something you can't get on the over-the-air networks. So that's part of it. And then the other big decision we have to make to keep all that material was the ages of the characters. You know, in the books, Danny is 13 years old when all of this begins. And I was drawing, although my books are fantasy,

They're not historical fiction in a strict sense. They occur in imaginary world and imaginary kingdoms. They're very heavily based on real medieval history and of course I've done a ton of research about real medieval history. And basically in the Middle Ages they did not have our concept of adolescence.

of this sort of teenage year in between where we're kind of adults but we're not adults and we have different ages where we're allowed to vote at this age and we're allowed to go to war and die at a different age and we're allowed to drink at another age and to have sex at a different age depending on which state we're in. All of that stuff.

They had child and adult, and the difference between them was the onset of sexual maturity. And we still have in our cultures remnants of this older structure in our ceremonies, the Jewish Bar Mitzvah, the Catholic Confirmation Ceremony, which I went through as 13, you know, reaffirming as an adult

the vows made for me by my godparents at baptism, you know, that the Catholics once considered 13 adulthood.

And I promise you that even when I went through my confirmation ceremony, my parents no longer did not consider me an adult even afterwards that I went through to write a passage. So, you know, these things are just remnants now. But they weren't remnants in the Middle Ages and they're not in the books. We have a very different way of looking at things. So I was using that based on historical precedent.

but there was no way that was going to fly in our present environment we couldn't do that if we had cast a 13 year old danny uh there could have been no sexual stuff whatsoever with with her and um even if we had cast even if we'd cast like a 17-year actress playing a 13-year-old uh there are some very stringent laws in like the united kingdom you can't you can't do that even if you have a an actress who's past the age of consent playing

someone who's under the age of consent, you cannot have a sexual situation because it gets adult child pornography thing and stuff like that. So we have a 22-year-old actress playing a 17-year-old Danny instead of a 17-year-old actress playing a 13-year-old Danny. And, you know, we did that deliberately so we could include this material. So I think that speaks to

the fact that we did think it was necessary to the story we wanted to tell and all that. Of course, once you make that change, then you have to make all of the other changes and you have to age up the other characters because Dany's birth ties to the, you know, she was born posthumously nine months after the Battle of the Trident and the fall of King's Landing and so the ages of the other characters has to be adjusted accordingly and it becomes a whole, you know, once again, the butterfly effect

And so the whole thing is a tapestry, and you can't just change one string without the whole thing unraveling. So Dan and David made this whole series of changes, but a long answer to a short question, I guess. DAN BARRY: Good answer, though.

I know you've got the prequel novellas out there, but DNJ7Lisa in San Diego asks, "Would you ever consider writing a prequel to Song of Ice and Fire series once it's finally done, such as the backstory of Lyanna and Rhaegar or Ned and Robert? I'd love to see how it all started." And by the way, when you're answering the questions, feel free to correct the pronunciation. It's come up a few times. You know, I don't have any plans to do any of those stories.

but I never rule anything out. You know, if I get an inspiration or one of those stories suddenly takes hold in my imagination and won't let go, sure, maybe I'll do something like that. One of the things I've been trying to do with the series is to tell these stories, tell the stories of Robert's Rebellion and some of the stories of the history of Westeros in successive revelations and flashbacks and people remembering things. So at the same time the story is moving forward,

it's also kind of moving backward and gaps are being filled in and you're learning, you hear about this event in the first book and then you hear a little more about it in the second book and then the third book, you hear about it from a different person who has a very different version of what happened from the previous versions you've heard and then there's this hole in it which gets filled in the fourth book. So I hope by the time it's all finished, I will have expanded backwards as well as gone forwards and many of the

Many of the gaps will have been filled in and you'll know more about the whole Robert and Rhaegar and everything like that. But it's not quite the same as telling a story about them, I realize. I still have two more gigantic books to write though. And six years to finish them. Right, yes. Very fast. I don't know what I'm going to write after that. Whatever seizes me. I mean, I like to do different things.

as a writer. This has been a huge project, certainly the biggest thing I've ever done in my life or career, but I've done other things and hope to continue to do other things. As much as I love Ice and Fire and fantasy, I also love science fiction. I want to do more science fiction work. I want to do more short stories. I love doing those. Wild Cards, which is a series I've been working on even longer than Ice and Fire. I've been

In the beginning of Wild Cards I wrote a lot for it as well as editing it. Now the series is still ongoing. Mostly I edit these days because I don't have time to write for it. But I'd love to go back and write some more Wild Card material about some of the characters for that. So what will I feel like writing after those six years are done? Who knows? Whatever I feel like writing on that particular day. There was someone at the podium I think who had another

Hi, so we have another question. It is: "Given HBO's history of completely changing storylines, I'm looking at you, True Blood, how did you get them to stay so true to your complex as all hell novels?" Candy and chocolates. You know, it's David and Dan, really. David Benioff and Dan Weiss are the showrunners.

You know, I don't have any veto power. I signed a pretty standard contract where I gave them rights to adapt this into a television series and I got certain titles and the agreement I'd write one script a year and a large dump truck full of money. And they can do, you know, they can have the aliens come down next season. They can turn the whole cast into vampires.

And I'm powerless to stop them, but I don't think they will do that. They love the books and they seem committed to telling my story in a different medium. And I knew all that before I signed any of the contracts. I mean, when these books started hitting the New York Times bestseller list, which was as early as Clash of Kings, I was approached by other people who wanted to adapt them, many for feature films.

And I had meetings with those people and heard their plans. How are they going to fit this giant thing in a feature film? Well, we're going to make it all about Jon Snow and we'll drop all these other characters. Or we'll make it all about Dany and we'll drop all these other characters. They had various schemes of how they would do it. Or, well, we'll just make the first book up to this point and then, you know,

We hoped that the movie would do well enough to order a second movie and none of these really appealed to me so I said no. Which is, it's always said that no is the sexiest word you can say in Hollywood. The more you say no the more they want you.

I guess that was true because they kept coming and eventually David and Dan came and we had a wonderful meeting that lasted like most of the day. We met for lunch and we were talking and getting all animated about how we were going to do the series over lunch in a crowded restaurant in Los Angeles. Little by little it emptied out and pretty soon we were the only people there drinking our seventh cup of coffee and iced tea and still talking about it.

And then more hours passed and we're still talking and the restaurant to dinner crowd is coming in and they're setting up for dinner. I think we closed that restaurant that night. So it was one of those classic meetings that you only get once in a while. But I had a great feeling about them. I mean...

You know, if you're J.K. Rowling, you can go into a situation where every studio in Hollywood wants you and you can set very stringent terms where you get to approve everything. But if you're not J.K. Rowling and virtually nobody is J.K. Rowling except for J.K. Rowling, then you can't do that and you have to find people that you trust and put your faith in them and in the understanding of the story.

Which is something that I think I also understood a fair amount of that because of my 10 years working in Hollywood and the fact that I had seen the other side of the process. Sometimes I think some of my fellow novelists who have not worked in television and film are very naive about this process. They get an offer and there's the dump truck full of money and they sign it, they cash the check

And then they're not involved in the series. They may get invited to the premiere and they come out of the premiere looking like all of their children have just been gassed. And with a stunned look on their face because everything has been changed. And some of them get very upset and start writing angry editorials and things like that. I haven't heard of anyone except Alan Moore actually returning the check, however. So I think there's a certain...

I don't know, hypocrisy there. It's not a secret that Hollywood does change things and maybe they change too many things. When I have my writer hat off and I put on my reader, my fanboy hat, I get upset as anyone and I can go on for a long time about how they change things in Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four in ways that I don't approve of. But nonetheless,

You gotta know the job is dangerous when you take it. Great. This one's for the nerds. So Dan Foley 182 in the UK asks, is it possible to warg into a dragon? Well, we'll have to see about that, won't we?

Fusion, also from England, asks: "How do you decide the characters that get to be a POV character? I read somewhere you resisted adding a character as a POV for a while until finally giving in. So I wondered the kind of decisions you have to make in that regard. Are there certain traits that a POV character needs or do they just need to be surviving?" Well, I try to give each of my POV characters a story.

And I've had an occasional P.O. character who only lasts a chapter and then dies. So in that case it's a very short story.

It's nonetheless a story. It should have the semblance of a beginning and a middle and end. Even if it's not connected to the main story of the books, it should have a certain Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead sort of thing. I mean, that was their story, which is off to the side of Hamlet's story, but both part of the larger story. I try to resist having POV characters who are just there to be a pair of eyes.

If a battle is taking place or someone is being murdered and I don't have a POV character there to see it, I tend to present that as a report that someone receives or a rumor rather than just switching into third guardsman on the left so I can have him see that. Because I don't like that as a reader and I don't like that as a writer.

But one of the criteria, so I guess one criteria is do they have a story and what is the story of the POV character? Another thing, though, is the thing of pair of eyes. I mean, sometimes you need the question, is it important to present this thing on stage to dramatize it and have the reader actually go through it? Or is it sufficient that we just hear about it, hear a summary? Do you need full dramatization or is summary narrative sufficient enough?

And if we need the scene to be brought out, then we may need a POV character there. And can I get any of my existing POV characters there? I mean, I've talked with those of you who read my NADA blog will know that with Dance of Dragons, one of the things that I wrestled with for a long time was what I called the Myrines NADA.

which I can't go into in any great detail without spoiling tremendous things. But a lot, and you know, five years from now, maybe when, if the next book is out or something, and everybody has read this book, I can, I will talk more about that in more detail. But a lot of it simply had to do with the

a number of POV characters being together and some important events coming on which some of them would see from one viewpoint and some from another and some wouldn't really know what was going on so how did I get these particular sequence of events across with what point of view and I would write something from one point of view and it wouldn't quite work so I'd write it from a different point of view and it wouldn't work either and I'd try splitting it, you know. I finally solved that problem in part by

introducing a new point of view who was much more centrally located but he'd been a character who'd been there all along and he was deeply involved in the things and he was, it all fell into place once I introduced that so you can have that kind of breakthrough. But I do need to kill a lot more of my point of view characters because there have gotten to be an awful lot of them.

So, which ones will die? Well, you'll just have to keep reading to find that out. male #1: And I think the character you're referring to is the one who was asked about. Okay, yes. male #1: Another Googler question. male #2: Okay, so this question is asking if you could take back one thing you wrote in any of your books, what would it be? One thing I wrote in any of my books?

Well, I would take back the little one-page thing at the end of Feast for Crows where I say the next book will be out within a year. That one has gotten me into no end of trouble. All I can say is I meant it at the time. I mean, I was splitting off 500 pages from a 1500-page manuscript so I only had to write another 500 pages. I can write 500 pages in a year. I've done it before.

Of course, the book turned out to need an extra thousand pages, not 500 pages. And I wound up rewriting almost all of the 500 pages that I was pulling out. So I turned out to be a lot more than 500 pages. And even that being said, yeah, I can write 500 pages in a year, in a good year. I've had good years in which I have written entire 500-page novels start to finish. But that's not to say I can do it every year regular as clockwork.

I am unfortunately a slow writer and have always been a slow writer. But I'm a slow writer given to

delusions of optimism that I can be a faster writer under certain circumstances and Sometimes I am but more often I'm not So we had a whole bunch of questions around this so we had to pick one of the most popular ones and go with it BT Fabian one asks I'm just curious several authors I read have discussed how hard it is to sometimes kill off certain characters which clearly is not an issue here and

You've certainly killed plenty off in your career, both in and out of A Song of Ice and Fire. Which character was the toughest to kill off? Well, I won't mention any character names, but the Red Wedding was the hardest thing I ever wrote. And those who have read the books know what I'm referring to.

That chapter occurs about two-thirds of the way through Storm of Swords but it was actually the last thing I wrote for that book. When I reached that chapter I couldn't write it. I skipped over it. I wrote all the aftermath and the other things. I wrote the other wedding in which someone else had died. That one was easy and fun to write. 'Cause everybody wanted to see that little shit die.

Actually, I'm being glib. I should say, yeah, that was an easier chapter to write. But even at the moment that that particular little shit does die, I tried to write it so that you would feel a moment of empathy for him in his dying and bring home the point that this too was a human being who was scared and terrified and then dead.

But only after everything else was finished did I go back and force myself to write the actual Wed Redding chapter simply because it was so painful to write. I invest a lot in these characters and particularly viewpoint characters. I live inside their skin so it's a little bit like killing a part of yourself or smothering one of your children. But you know, sometimes it has to be done for the service of the almighty god of the story.

And the story always comes first. And related to that, do you ever find that it would have been more expedient had you not killed a character off later on? No, not really. Not really. You know, sometimes my readers write me and they wish I hadn't killed off a particular character. But there was a reason for all of the major character deaths. I mean, a lot of minor characters die too and

Sometimes I don't even remember that they're dead. I'm saying some Night's Watch expedition leaves out and it has Fred, Bill and Sam on it and Elio Westrose points out, "You actually killed Bill two books ago." Oh, damn. I forgot about that. He died in a Thens attack but fortunately I have fans who have sharper eyes than I who will point out this stuff. But the major character deaths have all been planned and are all a part of the story.

And I don't regret them. Hopefully this means Syria will pop back up again. Can we have another Googler question? Okay, so this next question is, in your books there are several religious systems such as the seven, the drowned god, the faceless man, the old gods, etc. How do you come up with such a detailed yet entirely distinct doctrines? Are there any that aren't detailed in the books?

Well, yes, to start with the last part first, yes, there are many religions that are not detailed. You can see some of them in Arya's Braavos chapters where she visits, passes through the islands of gods and I throw in, you know, I throw in references to 17 different obscure religions that I'm probably never going to reveal in much detail. But some of them are, of course, you know, little tips of the hats to other religions

other fantasy authors and mythos that I admire. I mean, there is both a Roger Selassie homage and a H.P. Lovecraft homage on that Isle of the Gods for those who are sharp enough to see them. I do that kind of shit all the time. The Three Stooges are in book one if you're sharp enough to find them. The major religions...

that actually play a significant role in the story are somewhat based on real religions or real religious systems, although I don't

I don't believe in just doing a one-to-one transformation where I'm gonna take like Islam and file off the serial numbers and call it "Mislam" or something and pretend it's the same. I take certain tenets of the religions but then I maybe take part of this and part of that and I meld them together and I think about it and I add a few imaginative elements but certainly the old gods of the north

with the trees worship, I mean that's based on animism and traditional pagan beliefs of Wicca and various other Celtic systems and Norse systems melded into a construct of my own and with the fantasy element of the weirwood trees added as a central element there. The faith of the seven is very loosely modeled on the medieval Catholic Church

But again, with different elements. I mean, of course, the Catholic Church, which I was, I'm no longer a practicing Catholic, but that was how I was born and raised, you know, has the whole concept at the heart of it, Trinity, which was, you know, explained to me as, well, it's three, but it's also one, you know, which kids can never get. It's like, okay, we have three gods. No, no, you don't have three gods. You have one God. He has three, you know,

parts. Okay, so we don't have three, we just have one, right? It's like the shamrock, that was how, you know, the three-leaf clover. So I did that except I made it seven instead of three. I have the whole, well, we have seven gods, we have seven personas, so instead of father, son, and holy ghost, we have maiden mother crone, which of course I took from paganism as the traditional female thing. I kind of hobbled the male side together and then I added the stranger as the god of death who's...

Also the center of the the cult of the faceless men. I mean I think worship of death is Is an interesting basis for religion because after all death is the one universal it doesn't seem to matter what gods you pray to We all die in the real world and in fantasy worlds and if there was one culture where you did not die I suspect that would be that God would become very popular and

They will promise us eternal life, but whatever. So my faith with its hierarchies, its high septa and its seps and its orders of essentially monks and priests and so forth is loosely based on Catholicism. And then you have the red god, the Lord of Light from across the sea, which has a certain Zoroasterism nature

elements to it with the fire worship and so forth and the duality and also a lot from the Albigensian heresy, the Cathars who were exterminated by the Catholics in the great Albigensian crusade. But they had the fundamental belief, a dualist religion, that there were two gods. There was a good god and an evil god. And the world we live in was created by the evil god.

Which, you know, when you look at the world, particularly the medieval world, it's kind of persuasive. You know, what kind of good god would create that kind of crap, you know? What kind of good god sits around saying, hmm, leprosy, good idea. Let's give him leprosy. So the Lord of Light. So, yeah, all the religions are based. This is my general philosophy, I think, for fantasy is not to...

you know, base it in reality but then get a little imaginative to it and rework the elements and put this with that and add your own touch to it. But the grounding in reality I think gives it a certain verisimilitude and plausibility where just entirely made up religions that are unconnected to anything, it's much more difficult to make them plausible. Okay.

Emile Shin in Maine asks, "If you lived in Wisteros, which house would you like to be part of or in which area would you like to live?" Well, you know, there's something to be said for being an honorable Stark, but you know, you're kind of cold all the time.

Poor and so forth. You have a lot of land but there's not a lot of stuff on it, you know. On the other hand, if you're a Lannister, you have a nice house and all the gold you want and all of that stuff. So there's a lot to be said for being a Lannister. I don't know. Maybe I could probably see being a Lannister. And I would always pay my debts.

Great. Let's take another Googler question. Okay, so this question asks, "How do you keep all the secrets of the book to come to yourself? Are you dying to tell people what you know or do a few people already know everything?"

I'm not dying to tell everyone what I know. Eventually I will have to yield up all my secrets but actually if anything maybe I hold on to some of these things too long. I don't know. There's always the question, you know, when do you reveal something? How long do you draw it out? And the books are full of little puzzles and enigmas and reversals and how do you place those?

You don't want to give it away too soon, but if you stretch it out too long, everybody's going to guess it anyway. So, you know, at what point is that? But I kind of like having the puzzles, and you need to keep at least some of the puzzles to the end. But then again, you can't keep them all to the end, otherwise you end with a final chapter that's...

just, you know, one guy endlessly talking about, well, there's this and then there's this and the explanation for this is this and it's a very boring and not very good chapter. So, David and Dan know a few things, a few important revelations. So,

Eventually if I am hit by a truck or something like that they would know a few things but they don't know all by any means. My editors know a few things and have guessed a few things. I suspect that some of the fans probably know more than anything else. I'm going to be doing the concordance, the Ice and Fire concordance as the next project, the world of Ice and Fire which is under contract to Bantam and Random House. I'm doing that with Elio Garcia and Linda Antonsen of the Westeros site.

I swear they know Westeros better than I do. I mean, Elio's knowledge of it is just absolutely amazing. When I'm writing books, I sometimes call him up and say, I'm about to introduce this character. I think I mentioned him in book three. Did I ever say what color his eyes are? Within a half hour, I get blue-gray, page 314, second book. Oh, very good. I hate eye colors. Everybody should have the same color eyes. I'm constantly...

I'm constantly getting screwed up on eye colors. Just make them all purple. Yeah. So we probably have time for one more question. And I think the next one is such a good one, we should probably use a Googler one. The question is, the women in leadership roles seem particularly challenged. Can you share your insights about women in positions of power? I don't know if I have any particular views about women's position of power, although I think it's

It's more difficult for women, particularly in medieval settings, than for men because in addition to all the usual problems of having power, they have the additional problem of that they're a woman and a lot of people don't want them in a position of power in what is basically a patriarchal society.

So that is a challenge to all of my queens or would-be queens. And once again, I'm drawing from medieval history on that. You can repeatedly see some of the women who assume positions of power, be it Cleopatra in ancient Egypt or the Empress Maud during the

the Great English Civil War, the war between Stephen and Maud, who was essentially rejected simply because she was a woman. And even though her claim to the throne was very clear cut and was endorsed by her father, the king, and yet they turned to a cousin instead simply because he had a dick. Well, to be fair, he was also charming and she was sort of difficult. But nonetheless, there is that additional challenge. But one thing that I am trying to get at

in the books, a political aspect if you would, is to kind of show that this stuff is hard. I mean, I think an awful lot of fantasy, and even some great fantasy, falls into the mistake of assuming that the good man will be a good king. That is, all that is necessary is to be like a decent human being, and then when you're king, of course, everything will go swimmingly. And

You know, even Tolkien, you know, who is the, I think, my respect for Tolkien is second to none. And all modern fantasy flows from Tolkien. But there's an unspoken assumption in his books there that, you know, return of the king. Aragorn is the king now. Everything will be

will be hunky dory, you know, the land will prosper and it will be wonderful and the crops will be good and there will be justice for all and the enemies will be defeated and you know, you never actually get into the nitty gritty of Aragorn ruling and you know, what is his tax policy and how does he feel about crop rotation and

You know, how does he handle land disputes between two nobles, both of whom think that they should have this particular village? So they take turns burning it down in order to establish this claim. These are the hard parts of ruling, be it in the Middle Ages or now. And of course,

it's not enough to be a good man to be an effective ruler and it never has been. If it has been, Jimmy Carter would be the greatest president of the 20th century. I mean, he's clearly, I think, the best human being to be president in my lifetime but he was not a particularly effective president for all his decency and his humanity and his compassion and his undoubted intelligence. I mean, the man was a nuclear engineer in the Navy but nonetheless,

he failed at it and there have been there are some examples of medieval kings in history who were terrible human beings but they were nonetheless very good kings for their country so it's complicated and it's hard and I wanted to show not just with the women but you know you see

in my books repeated examples of both kings and the hand of the king, the prime minister if you would, trying to rule and whether it be Ned Stark or Tyrion Lannister or Tywin Lannister or Daenerys Targaryen in the latest book Cersei Lannister in the book before that and trying to deal with some of the real challenges that affect anyone trying to rule the Seven Kingdoms or even a city like Meereen and it's hard.

You know, we can all read these books or look at history and say, oh, so-and-so was stupid, made a lot of mistakes. Look at all these stupid mistakes they make. But these kind of mistakes are always much more apparent in hindsight than when you're actually kind of faced with the decision about...

my God, what would I do in this situation? How do I resolve the thing? Do I do the moral thing? But what about the political consequences of the moral thing? Do I do the pragmatic, cynical thing and just kind of screw the people who are screwed by it? I mean, it's hard. And I want to get to all of that.

Be it a male ruler or or a woman woman's ruler. So everyone that brings us to about time Thanks everyone in the room for coming along. Thanks for submitting your great questions Thanks everyone on the stream for tuning in and George Thank you so much for taking the time out to come in answer the questions and great. It's my pleasure it's been a thrill to be here and to to take place in this high-tech computer things and

I think you should bring some of these strange machines of yours to Westeros. It could probably entirely replace the whole thing of tying messages to the legs of ravens. Great. Thanks, George. Thanks for listening. To discover more amazing content, you can always find us at youtube.com slash talks at Google. Talk soon.