12 notes

I don’t write the chapters in the order that you read them. I do switch. I’ll get in a Tyrion groove, where I’ll write four or five Tyrion chapters, and I hit a stopping point or something like that. Or I’ll realize that I’m way ahead on Tyrion, and I gotta catch up with the other characters. And I’ll go back and switch to Arya or Sansa or something like that. It’s always difficult switching gears, because the characters have very different voices and very different ways of thinking about the world. I’ll be writing up a storm and doing pages every day, and the minute I switch to a different character, that first day it’s like, “Oh, God, I have to read all these characters again. I have Sansa sounding like Tyrion, and that’s not good.” I have to read more of her chapters and immerse myself in Sansa.

7 notes

I’m a strong believer in telling stories through a limited but very tight third person point of view. I have used other techniques during my career, like the first person or the omniscient view point, but I actually hate the omniscient viewpoint. None of us have an omniscient viewpoint; we are alone in the universe. We hear what we can hear… we are very limited. If a plane crashes behind you I would see it but you wouldn’t. That’s the way we perceive the world and I want to put my readers in the head of my characters.

20 notes

Life is very full of sex, or should be. As much as I admire Tolkien — and I do, he was a giant of fantasy and a giant of literature, and I think he wrote a great book that will be read for many years — you do have to wonder where all those Hobbits came from, since you can’t imagine Hobbits having sex, can you? Well, sex is an important part of who we are. It drives us, it motivates us, it makes us do sometimes very noble things and it makes us do sometimes incredibly stupid things. Leave it out, and you’ve got an incomplete world.

12 notes

All fiction, if it’s successful, is going to appeal to the emotions. Emotion is really what fiction is all about. That’s not to say fiction can’t be thoughtful, or present some interesting or provocative ideas to make us think. But if you want to present an intellectual argument, nonfiction is a better tool. You can drive a nail with a shoe but a hammer is a better tool for that. But fiction is about emotional resonance, about making us feel things on a primal and visceral level.

These are some complicated ideas we’re touching on now. I hate to make sweeping statements about fiction in general. Every writer does his own thing. But my own view of the world… I don’t think I’m a misanthrope, or gloomy. I think love and friendship are very important parts of what make life worth living. There is room for happiness. But that having been said, there are some basic truths. One of them is that death waits for all of us at the end. Whether it’s the Middle Ages or today, sooner or later we are all going to be ashes to ashes, and dust to dust. I think that colours things. Any happy ending where everything is resolved, and everything is jolly, maybe rings false because of what is coming for us.

Another thing that is maybe not so big a part of Ice and Fire, but certainly a huge part of my early work, is the existential loneliness that we all suffer. While we interact with other human beings, we can never really know them. I think these things, that we feel on some deep instinctual level, make us feel the resonances in fiction. Historically, tragedy has always had more respect than comedy. I have a great deal of respect for comedy, and I like to do the occasional funny scene, but it doesn’t get respect. Even Shakespeare we teach as tragedy. We enjoyed his comedies, but if you ask what are the greatest Shakespeare plays, people are going to talk about Hamlet and Macbeth. They’re not going to talk about Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It. What does that tell us?