GEORGE RR MARTIN Comic Con Panel

thank you William and uh thank all all you guys for coming you fill up the hall nicely so we're going to talk a little bit today about uh George's comic book work which a lot of you won't be familiar with um it's a very old sh on you it's an old passion of George he's been a comic book geek you know from the the get-go and so uh we'll look at you know what's What's led him there and how it compares to you know writing some of the long form stuff I am I am actually uh the first comic book fan I think uh in in 1964 Len we ran the first ComicCon in New York City in Granite Village in 1964 30 people showed up it's grown a little since then as you know 30 people showed up and we we met in one room on a Saturday in Greenwich Village the guests of honor were fabulous Flo Steinberg and Steve ditco so uh I think that was the last ditco show right yes I think I think that was the last time ditco came to a ComiCon we must have scared him very badly but uh there were about 30 people as I said and I was the first one to show up so my my badge said number one so I guess that makes me he's the first comic fan the first comic fan and now all of you I guess are my children God help me so when you're doing something short form like the the stories we've adapted into the comics what can you do in a short form story better than you can do in a long form story you know I don't I don't tend to think of the forms as being that different for me I mean I I know there are writers who do uh you know the science fiction writers of America has has three categories for short fiction for it's nebula Awards it has short story novet and Nolla and then novel of course um and some writers make real distinctions between that they'll they'll tell you that the structure of a novelet is fundamentally different from the structure of a Nolla um me I just start writing a story and then when it's over I look at how many words it is and oh look I wrote a Nolla and you know sometimes I say oh look I I'm writing a seven book gigantic series admittedly the times where I say oh look I've wrote a Nolla uh you know it usually takes me less time maybe a month maybe two but uh whatever so why do you think Science Fiction and Fantasy uh are important to us as human beings what what drives us to read it and what drives you to write it well you know it's you write what you read and I grew up reading this stuff I can't answer for all the rest of you out there why you read this stuff um but I kind of understand why I do I mean I was born and raised in Bon New Jersey a blue collar industrial city across New York Bay from New York City but Bon was very much a self-contained City despite its closest to New York people were born in Bon and and lived all their lives in Bon and died in Bon and they worked in Bon and they went to school in Bon uh and that was certainly true of my family which had been in Bon on both sides for multiple Generations uh we didn't have much money we lived in uh the federal housing projects down on First Street and I went to uh a public Grade School Mary Jan donusu on Fifth Street and that was my world my world was five blocks long because we never went anywhere we didn't even own a car um and I think there was a hunger for me in me from a very early age to experience more than those five blocks contained uh and when I discovered comic books at first first and then Science Fiction and Fantasy Books uh they took me away from those five blocks they took me out of Bon they took me across the world and to other worlds and to other times and to other places to Middle Earth and to barsum and you know to Fabulous cities like metropolis and Gotham City and uh then when Marvel came along to this weird place New York City which i' I'd heard rumors of but uh I I didn't often get there except once a year you know for the Radio City Musical Christmas show that was a tradition in our family so I I think one of the fifth things that fiction fulfills in all of us is is uh vicarious experience I mean I I wrote in one of the books uh one of the Ice and Fire books the reader lives the reader lives A Thousand Lives before he dies the man who does not read lives only one and I think that's that's true I I have I have traveled the universe and I've climbed mountains and I dived to deepest sea and I piloted ships to Mars and I've fought monsters with my broadsword and I've Loved hundreds of beautiful women and uh it's all through the wonders of fiction and Imagination and uh well except for a beautiful women part so some of the uh science fiction early writers you you enjoyed and got you hooked who do you consider some of the Masters who do you consider the folks that every time you go back to look at their work you're still impressed well the for me the the pros writer who who had the most profound effect on me was Robert a heinlin I mean I was reading uh comic books uh voraciously but I I didn't read book books uh you know i' I'd learned to read in school of course and uh in in my era all of you are probably too young to remember this but for for kids of my era you learned to read with a these readers as they were called that were full of The Adventures of Dick and Jane dick dick and Dick and Jane and their little sister Sally and their dog spot this this was the dullest family that had ever lived on Earth and I I didn't see the charm of reading reading about Dick and Jane I mean boy they were boring but then someone gave me a rer a hline book half space it will travel script's hard cover uh and suddenly I was going to the moon and to Pluto and to the Lesser M magenic you know the Lesser Cloud thing uh thankfully with no Dicker Jane with no Dicker Jane you know instead I was with Peewee and the mother thing and we were fighting the worm faces and uh boy I was hooked uh I started I I had an allowance of a dollar a week which at the time would buy me 10 comic books um and now I had to say well I want to buy more of these science fiction book so and they cost 35 cents so that mean I had to sacrifice three and a half comic books but I thought it was worthwhile so I started buying well you're silly um I started buying paperback books off the spinner rack and uh discovered all sorts of writers but for many years hin line remained my favorite and I would always go back to hin line and read things the Puppet Masters uh one one of the scariest alien invasion books ever ever written uh would became my favorite book for many years uh Starship Troopers um his other juveniles things like Star Beast and the Rolling Stones um but of course I read many other writers too uh that I discovered during that period Isaac azimov and uh um Jerry Saul um a van voke who I always found was incomprehensible but uh I kept thinking maybe I'm just not smart enough to understand what a van v is on about um I finally got old enough to think no no I'm I'm smart enough it's just his stories are incomprehensible brilliant but incomprehensible um one of the writers I I settle on of course uh from that day to this day is Jack Vance who uh passed away last year sadly but uh I think Jack Vance was the greatest science fiction fantasy writer of his his day and he's a writer who was doing great work well into his 90s and uh you know I hope to uh emulate him his his every time a new Jack Vance book came out I would drop everything I was doing and buy it and and read it immediately I there's no unread Jack Vance books on my shelf so all right you're having to sacrifice some Comics to buy these books what were what were some of your favorite Comics well I was there and this will really establish how old I was there uh I I read lot of comics in the ' 50s uh you know when I was young I read all sorts of comics I read uh the superhero comics which were all coming pretty much from DC then uh National periodical publications as they were called Superman and Batman and then the early Julia Schwarz titles the the silver Age Flash and and Green Lantern and the atom and all that uh but of course when I was younger I was also reading other types of comics comics in those days were much more varied than uh you know they became in subsequent decades the superhero comics were there but there were also a lot of war comics there were Western Comics uh you know that you could read they were romance Comics yeah those were for the girls though so I I didn't want to touch them because I might get girl cooties you know you you had to be careful about that sort of stuff but when I was a little kid of course I read like The Harvey comics of uh um baby UI and and Casper the Friendly Ghost and all that and then I got two old and sophisticated for those um uh they were I mean there were comic genres that are largely forgotten today they they were uh hot rod Comics you know I which I read voraciously I was a big reader of hot rods and racing cars uh because my family as I said was poor we didn't own a car so the fantasy of owning a car was very exciting to me especially a hot rod or a racing car so I bought all of those um and at a certain point after I'd started reading the science fiction I stopped buying Comics I decided I was now old and sophisticated and uh I so I wouldn't read Comics anymore so I stopped buying comics for maybe a year or two and then one day I was at the spinner wreck in the Kelly Parkway candy store where I got my stuff and right next to it was the comic wreck and I noticed this weird looking comic called The Fantastic Four and it was issue number four but it looked sort of interesting one of the one of the guys on it was a monster and yet they seemed to be like superheroes or something and it was from some company that didn't even have a name just it said IND D in the in middle and tiny print I didn't know what it was but I bought it and so I was right there for the beginning of the Marvel the Marvel Renaissance so that was fantastic for number four and then I promptly went back and and got the first three well eventually not promptly you couldn't get back issues in those days cuz you know they were on the sale they were gone yeah there were no comic stores you bought them in candy stores and bodegas and and you know from spinner wxs um but that got me starting reading comics again and just in the nick of time so I was there a couple months later when Amazing Fantasy 15 came out with a Spider-Man character who I kind of like to and at some point there I wrote a letter to uh one of the comic fan scenes to Fantastic before and it was published uh and then my life changed forever because in those days when they printed your letter they printed your full address and I started getting all this mail from other comic book readers across the country who were like junior high school kids like me saying oh you like the Fantastic 4 I like the Fantastic 4 look here's a fan Zan that I've done and it was the birth of comics fandom it was before the first Comic-Con but they were all these fanzines that were um printed in mograph machines if they were really classy most of the comic fanzines were printed by a process called ditto which involved a tray of gelatin and a crank and you know they could make like 30 copies uh or something like that before it faded to elegibility and actually from copy like five onward it was semi- elegible but and it was fascinating though when I started writing letters to that and some of them were were many of them were analysis and discussion of what was happening in the Fantastic 4 of JLA some of them though were original comic stories of characters that the uh the fans had made up themselves um and I read some of those and they were there were some good ones in there and there were a lot that were really really bad really kind of wretched and semil literate and I said the the words that changed my life forever even I can do better than that and I did I wrote some comic stories and I sent them off to these fanz and they said H this is good stuff and they published them and you know people wrote letters saying hey I like that story by George uh R Martin initially in an RR because it was right around the time that I got my I was Catholic I got a confirmation name and that gave me my second middle initial so my entry into Comic fandom and my first Publications and my second middle initial all came around the same time and uh thus I was launched as a amateur comic book writer H so as you're writing how do you see a difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy you know I I think the difference is insignificant there are people who uh think it's a very important difference there are there are particularly science fiction writers and I've been part of the field now for for many decades there are science fiction writers who think that science fiction fantasy are Polar Opposites and uh almost always everybody who believes that believes that science fiction is the you know more significant of the two genres um but I read both of them interchangeably as a kid I read Roberty Howard one day and Robert Robert a heinlin the next day I read um HP Lovecraft uh and and I read Isaac Asimov uh it was all my father who who was a fan of westerns uh didn't understand any of this stuff at all none of this is real what is this weird stuff that you're reading why do you have to read all this weird stuff and that's was fine to me it was all weird stuff science fiction fantasy horror um and writers in those days moved easily from one to another I mean Robert Ain line is identified with science fiction but he did write several fantasies Isaac azamon wrote fantasies uh Paul Anderson wrote fantasies and some great fantasies too uh HP Lovecraft wrote several stories that that were published in astounding science fiction and are definitely science fiction stories even though they have horrific elements so the genres all kind of Blended together then in today's publishing climate they've really separated and people built walls between them but I I think it's a false distinction they're all branches of romantic literature AE imaginative literature as opposed to the realistic stream in literature and uh the only thing that differs is the furniture you know sometimes you have aliens and spaceships sometimes you have dragons and castles it doesn't matter it's the story that matters it's the characters that matter uh so your work is known for you know having these great strong characters that usually tend to kill off but what what do you think makes I kill off the weak ones too they all die what do you what do you think of that makes a strong enabling character in science fiction well I don't think science fiction is any different from any other branch of literature in that regard um you know it character is still at the heart of everything I mean um William fauler when they gave him the Nobel Prize gave a very famous acceptance speech and he said that the uh the only thing that matters The Only Thing Worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself and that's always been my Mantra um I try to put that in all my stories there's a level of of complexity in real human beings that you have to try to capture as a writer we are all contradictions we are all people who are capable of heroism one day and abominable Behavior the next day we we can all be heroes we can all be villains sometimes we we are the same thing at the same time um so when I read or watch TV and I see the perfect hero or the absolutely black villain I don't I don't like that um and you know this is actually one thing I can talk about Faulkner I can talk about Faulkner all I want but and and it's it's very agite of me but the truth is a lot of it goes back to Stan Lee and those early Marvel Comics uh I mean the Fantastic 4 when I encountered the Fantastic 4 in ' 61 uh it was such a revelation to me because they were nothing like the Justice League or the DC heroes that I was that I was used to I mean especially in those early issues the Fantastic 4 had real conflicts the thing hated being the thing and there was a violent streak in him you know when when he fought with the Human Torch in like a story like Fantastic 4 number four um it was a real fight it wasn't friendly bickering between families like it became in later decades where they're just guys who like to smart off to each other you know they came to blows uh and there was a rage in the thing that was uh you know directed at at Reed Richards also for you know not curing him and getting him into the situation in the first point there was also I didn't know at 13 years old I couldn't quite tell what it was but you look at those and there's a sexual tension in some of those early issues it's clear that Ben Grim also had the hots for Sue storm well we all did come on well yeah and and uh when they brought in the Submariner um you know Sue was attracted to him and it was like a genuine sexual triangle for a couple years would sue pick neyar or Reed um and you didn't know how it would come out because Lee was so unpredictable this is the kind of stuff human Stories the human heart in conflict with itself Spider-Man came along and he was not the flash or Green Lantern he was not hey I'm going to be a hero he was constantly you know having self-doubts and and you know he was a great hero but he still couldn't get laid or uh and he lived with his aunt and uncle you know is it was uh uh it was just great stuff and and uh that kind of gray characters the the the Marvel characters had a depth that the more traditional DC characters that I had grown up with did not have and that really got me addicted to uh this idea of great characters I I was uh being interviewed earlier today by some guys from Marvel and we were talking about the Avengers I published a letter in the Avengers uh as well h i published a number of letters in the Arvy Marvel Comics of the early days and my letter in the Avengers was a letter of Praise about the first issue that introduced Wonderman number nine yeah and uh those of you who weren't there for Avengers number nine you know this this character Wonderman comes along and he's he's really powerful and and uh he he comes along suddenly and he joins The Avengers as this new hero who and he's really a plant uh who's been set in to destroy the Avengers from within um but then when when the crucial time comes he can't bring himself to do it so he revolts against his evil Masters and and dies heroically in the same issue that introduced him I look back on an that now from the distance and I say my God the influence over my work is enormous I mean here's here's this gray conflicted character he's he seems to be a hero to the outside world and even the Avengers accept him as a hero but he's really a villain but when he comes to the point where he's supposed to murder someone he can't bring himself to do it and then he pays the ultimate price for that and dies heroically uh and I've been stealing from that ever since uh it's great Chris then they ruined it by bringing him back but uh you know what the hell Marvel's never had a character they couldn't kill and bring back in like 12 months I mean they go through them all I think Uncle Ben right he's still dead I couldn't tell you I he's probably a clone so I think I think that's a rule of comic books that no one but Uncle B and Batman's parents it really did so with all the great characters you you create and get invested in with you know these huge stories do you ever feel personally upset when you decide to kill somebody off is there a sense of loss yeah there are in some ways these characters are more real to me than than real people because I know them better than real people I've been writing I Song of Ice and Fire since 1991 so um uh even if I've been playing since 1992 to kill a character when I finally get to the point where that character has to die it's hard for me to pull the trigger or swing the sword is the case may be but uh you know the story rules and I do what I have to do but it doesn't mean I necessarily uh enjoy it for the most part now we're talking about major characters I kill a lot of minor characters too and they're just sort of uh passing through F even in the case of minor characters I try to give them a little little moment of life a little something so that just not spear carrier number seven uh red shirt yeah you should you should death is uh death's a pretty serious business and um I remember when I was on a I was on a TV show in the 80s called Beauty and the Beast some of you may remember and uh Linda Hamilton was the star of that show uh and after two seasons she left the show so the writers on that show had to make a decision uh do we recast her part or do we write her character out in some way and of course we decided it would be more dramatic to write her out indeed to kill her and then to bring on a new Beauty for to to be Beauty and the Beast and we did that um the network supported us in killing her but they wanted us to get past it very quickly you know we had big fight with them because they said because the next episode after Linda's character Katherine Chandler died was Katherine's funeral and we had all these characters mourning her and talking about her and Vincent was inconsolable and U you know played by Ron proman and her even though she was dead the next 12 episodes that our third season uh was largely a search for her murderer and a search for vengeance and all that all of this the network hated and they said look the actress has left the show you have to kill the character we understand that but people don't want to be sad so don't don't have all this mourning stuff and this grief just you know kill her and he should like get revenge in that same episode and then we should go on to new adventures and her name should never be mentioned again and swept under the and get the new Beauty in there quickly so it's fun to watch and uh you know we had a huge fight about that and and uh I still think artistically emotionally we we were right because we said no that cheapens the whole character death death should matter you know people have been following this character and loving this character for two years she's died we're going to build the whole show around it we're going to show the grief and we're going to show the mourning death should hurt just like it does when you know your your mother dies or your father dies or your best friend dies or God God preserve it doesn't happen your child dies when death happens to us in real life it's a wrenching gut-wrenching event that makes us makes us weep and makes us sad and we can't easily shrug it aside and say well okay dead what's on television um the truth was though that in some ways the network may have been right because our ratings after Linda's death fell off a cliff and um people clearly didn't want to people were too saddened by the death and too affected by the death and they didn't want to tune in every week to be sad um and I had some of that fear with Game of Thrones you know because in first season when we killed uh killed Ned Stark uh I I really wondered about the next week I said okay is this going to be the same thing here is other our ratings was that oh well going to fall off the cliff here but thankfully they didn't and I don't know if uh the modern audience is is just more bloody than the audience of 19 1989 but uh you know maybe we are or maybe we did it better I don't know but um but nonetheless it still maintains my attitude you death should not be an act break here if if you're going to kill a character it should have an impact on the other characters the the loss of that character should be felt I want my readers to feel emotions um I mean that's what I think fiction is all about if you want to make an intellectual argument um non-fiction is the perfect vehicle for that but fiction is about emotion I want you guys to read my books and to laugh and to cry and you know if it's a scary horrific scene I want you to be scared I uh I want you if it's a scene where the character is in Jeopardy I want you to be afraid to turn the next page you know I want you to be hungry at the feast scenes and aroused at the sex scenes or uh you know whatever ever as if you're experiencing the events on the page and not just reading about them in the comfort of your favorite reading chair um and not all the emotions can be good ones uh sometimes part of that vicarious experience is the darker emotions like grief and and fear and anger and I want to make you feel those too so thank you so you've spent a great deal of your life engaging with fans and being involved in fandom and you know doing conventions and even as your career has blown up to the unimaginable level it has you're still dedicated to going out there and and seeing the fans and spending time and giving all of us your time it's why has this always been so important to you you know I am a fan I mean I I was the first fan as I said and uh um with science fiction fandom uh I went to my first world Con in 1971 uh my first comic con was even before that my first San Diego Comic-Con was in the 80s uh there's always been a sense of coming home I mean I've made so many relationships over the years in fandom professional relationships with editors and Publishers but also friends that I've met at conventions uh I met my wife had a convention um she said once the first time she attended a science fiction convention it was like at last my people I have found you and and part of I feel part of that too and and always have um so I I go to a lot of convention I mean people ask me well why do you go to people understand why I come to ComicCon San Diego I mean there 150,000 people here it's a gigantic opportunity like no other to promote your work and uh it's very important professionally HBO wants me here uh Random House my main publisher wants me here my other Publishers like Avatar press seem to want me here um so there's big promotion for that but I also go to little 500 person conventions in Albuquerque and in North Carolina and in Fargo North Dakota and people say why the hell are you going to Fargo North Dakota for 500 people and it's because you know I have fun at these Sun conventions or or at least I I used to I I have to admit there's a a dark side to the popularity of the show and it's that you know in the last few years I've become a celebrity and that's not the better roses that it necessarily always is here because it's it's it's sometimes hard to to just relax and have a drink with friends at a at a hotel bar or or eat your dinner or something like that walk around com or walk around Comic-Con yeah it does sadden me that I can't walk the floor anymore at ComicCon because I used to do that for years I used to just wander around the floor and one or two people would recognize me and that would be fine and I would sign their books or something but now it's like one or two people per feet so I I can no longer you know go and see what the new Comics are and appreciate the booths and I have to have security and all that and you know I don't want to complain about that it's it's something that most writers would of course would give their left leg to have and uh I do appreciate that I appreciate all the support and and uh affection but it's certainly change the way I experience these these conventions sure especially big ones like this so that's another reason I go to little ones because there's like fewer people if there's 500 people you sign 500 autographs you're done I'm done so let's talk a little bit about the the couple projects you you've done for me that are out um so uh we're just a VI here the number one of the series in the house of the worm um it's a short story that you wrote quite a while ago uh that we had done a Nolla a Nolla yes so tell tell me a little bit about that or the you know the time of your life when you were working on it yeah it was that was during the uh 80s it was uh um early 80s I think I was I was still living in Chicago at the time and uh there was a a editor in the field Terry Carr uh um great editor uh he he did a series of original anthologies called universe and I'd met Terry at the very first science fiction convention I went to in 1971 and he really impressed me then and and universe was a great series of uh books that really it was it was just the kind of Science Fiction that I really loved and just the kind I really wanted to write so in those days I was selling to Galaxy and to fnsf and to uh um you know an log all of all of the magazines but I wanted to sell to universe as well just to have that feather in my cap and I wanted to sell to Terry because I knew he was an excellent editor so I kept sending him stories that he kept rejecting and and finally I wrote this one uh in the house of the Warmness Nolla set in it's sort of set in a Far Far Future where the sun is largely going out very influenced by Jack Vance I think and his dying Earth series um and there's only a small remnant of humanity left and they've retreated into this vast underground bunker and uh it's a very decadent kind of uh Society they're eating worms and spiders and having meaningless sex and uh and there were all these tunnels below them that are lost in darkness so it's a very kind of Baroque horror kind of feel to it um and I sent it to Terry Carr and Terry Carr finally bought something of mine uh which was a Big Thrill for me but then he didn't put it in Universe he had some other Anthology or one-off that he decided it would be good for so I never got to be in universe but uh I did sell a story to Terry Carr and I was very uh very pleased with that and uh I remember when you wanted to buy it I I said uh William you you do realize that half of the story takes place in absolute Blackness so you're just going to have two issues of completely black panels with word balloons boy I wish I could see but I think you found a way to solve that problem yeah it's just really really dark coloring but it's it's a yeah it's a novel I've I've always been pleased with um and I hope you guys are too and uh you know we started uh doing the uh the Avatar comic uh uh 137 years ago uh and we hired this artist from Brazil who drew one penel a year I think right yes exactly 137 years later here we are no tell you should tell them about the artist you know more yeah so Ivan Rodriguez is the artist uh he worked for me actually on a series with Warren Ellis called Dr Sleepless and then uh uh those bastards at DC came in stole him and uh he did a bunch of stuff for them Legion of Superheroes Justice League uh and in the meantime was hunting and pecking away on in the house of the worm cuz he you know he committed to do it and wanted to do it but then he had all these other gigs and yeah yes it took an inordinately large amount of time but it looks beautiful and uh you know now it's all done so we can actually put it out monthly uh issue one's debuting here so then you know subsequent months we have each of the other issues um the adaptation was done by my friend John Joseph Miller uh who is one of my Wild Card writers for those who know my Wild Card series a creator of uh Yen and carif effects uh and numerous other Heroes and uh he should not be confused with John Jackson Miller or on J Miller who are just totally different people but uh to his annoyance I keep telling him John change your name they keep getting confusing you with other people but uh he did a fine job with the adapation and uh Mr Rodriguez uh did very well with the art and it's cool so when you see something like House of the worm turned into Comics which of course you know you never really originally intended and this also works for when you see your other material adapted into say TV shows H how does it feel experiencing the work in an entirely different you know method of delivery like that is it is it just an outof body experience do you well it it first of all it's there's a little there's a little anxiety when you turn it over to someone else um because you don't know what you're going to get you could get something beautiful uh and terrific and you could get something really bad it's like you know you you have your kid and you're taking him to school for the first time and or you turn turning them over to you know wonderful people who will teach him well and or you are these a nest of child molesters who will sell him for medical experiments after they're done with him uh you you never you never quite know that's pretty much worst case scenario it is it is yeah but you know I think every parent probably fears that uh and and that's true whether you're selling a movie a movie deal or a comic deal or anything else where you're turning over your work over other people um but all you can do is you know try to select the people well and and hope that uh it turns out for the best I I think in the best adaptation the the they add something to it each of these mediums is different and uh you know of course with comic books you have you have the wonderful dimensions of the art so ideally the best comic adaptations take a Pros work and and add images to it that not only bring it to life but that adds something that images that the in a way that the reader of the pros might never have seen or or thought of um so that's exciting but you know it never for me it never quite matches the uh um the original story I mean I'll but I'm in a unique position and obviously biased and Prejudice yeah but so I I'll always prefer the original story and in the case of something like Game of Thrones you know as as usually popular as the show is and I love the show and I love what they're doing with it but for me it's always great also that so many people thousands of people tens of thousands of people who have enjoyed the show have then gone on to buy my books and to read the original version of the of the story which is larger and more detailed and you know more more complex uh than the show can possibly do in its 10 hours uh and it's same is true Something In The House of the worm mhm so uh we're also finally collected uh the previous series we did skin trade which was again adapting one of your award-winning shorts um now that's a that's a horror project and and you're not known for doing tons of horror stuff uh so so tell us a little bit about I have done I have done some horror stuff um and I've done some hybrids uh as I say I don't I don't see these firm distinctions so just like HP Lovecraft would weld Science Fiction with horror I did that with stories like sand kings and night Flyers and uh I I like the idea of taking two genres and melding them together and coming up with something halfway in between in the case of skin trade it's a horror story with a sort of a Noir uh private detective hardboiled private detective story it's a private detective werewolf uh uh kind of story set in the decaying Midwestern city um that one was written in the late 80s I think I was actually on Beauty and the Beast when I when I wrote it um so I spent 10 years in Hollywood roughly working on Twilight's own Beauty and OB beast and then in development um roughly from 1985 to 1995 but during all that period I always wanted to keep my hand in with stories and books because that was my roots I didn't want to lose track of my roots uh so I tried to do as many short stories as I could I didn't have the time to write a novel but I could do more the occasional short story and I launched Wild Card during that period And I also wrote skin trade there was a a small press around uh back then called Dark Harvest and they had a annual Anthology series called night visions which was a a a trific idea and each night visions featured three writers um Paul Michael the guy who who ran dark Harvest uh you know said well I in every book I want a a bigname writer and a middleweight writer and uh a new writer a new Young writer um but he C he didn't say it that way publicly but uh he we know that was the design on it and each of the three writers was asked to contribute 30,000 words of original horror fiction and that's all we had to all we had to do uh now you could take the 30,000 words you could write 10 3,000 word stories or you know three 10,000w novelettes or in my case one 30,000 word Nolla um and when he asked me I had edited one of these things and now he was up to he did one of these annually I had edited night visions 3 and now he was doing night visions 5 and he wanted me to be one of the writers in it and the main the heavyweight in night visions five was this guy named Stephen King so I would have been the middleweight and I said you know yeah I I really want to be in this book uh cuz um millions of people going to buy it to read the Stephen King's Story and then they discover my story too but I was working on a TV show at the time I didn't really have any time um but I knew I had to get this done so I blew the deadline I I you know I blow deadlines all the time it's nothing new it's nothing new I've been doing it but thankfully Paul took took pity on me and gave me a little extra time to get it done and I you know I was working all week on Beauty and the Beast and then I would stay in the office I would come in on Saturday and Sunday and stay to R day and try to get the skin trade finished and it was this werewolf story I had done fever dream a few years earlier which was my vampire thing so I'd always wanted to do a werewolf thing to pattern uh with my vampire thing and uh um and I had this great idea about this this you know sexy young female private eye and um a hypochondriac asthmatic werewolf collection agent uh and it it just it wrote itself I love those two characters I love it I always wanted to write more stories about the two of them but I I haven't had the chance but it's uh still one of my favorite of my novellas so so we've got you know both both these the collection of skin trade and in the house of the worm number one at Booth 2701 if anybody wants to pick one up after the panel and I've defaced most of them and yeah they're all signed actually so so you know you don't even have to stand in line to get my signature you can just go over to his booth and uh get my my illegible scroll it's that's this one in silver here yeah uh so I think to to wrap it up um I'm certain in the crowd there's quite a few aspiring writers uh what does it take to succeed what any essential advice which I'm certain this is a question you get all the time but well I have my best advice is on my my website I frequently ask questions but you know it's there's no secret I mean it's you have to write every day you have to the more you write the better you'll get you have to read widely that's one thing that I I try to hammer home especially at things like a a comic book convention or science fiction convention because the fans I've met and this has been true for decades many of the fans I meet read a lot but they read very narrowly they discover at a very early age they like superhero stories and then they read nothing but superhero stories or they like science fiction and they read that um that's fine and I like superhero stories too and and I like science fiction fantasy but I also read uh mystery novels I also read a lot of his hisorical fiction I also read literary fiction and you know I Raymond Chandler and F Scott Fitzgerald and William Goldman and and uh Dennis leaine and people like that are are marvelous writers and the more you read the more you see the techniques being used and what different people are doing the more uh you learn and so read widely read veraciously and try to write every day and don't give up um that's another big part of it I mean there were a lot of writers who started um at the same time I did or even later who have vanished and why have they vanished they stopped writing they gave up uh I'm still here and uh because I didn't give up there were a couple points in my career I could have given up writing is not a career by the way for um anyone who wants security it's a it's a you have to be a bit of a Gambler it's a career of highs and lows of ups and downs and and you can never really say oo I've made it you know I had that point and you know I had with fever dream I all I was a hot young writer in the 70s and the early 80s I I every one of my I was winning Awards Yugo Awards and nebula awards every book I wrote got a bigger advance than the one before I got great reviews and uh I really thought I was hot and then I I wrote a novel called the armag getting rag and suddenly my career was over cuz it sold so poorly uh so there's always these reverses that will come and smack you in the face uh Trends will change you you'll be the you'll be The Cutting Edge and then you'll be yesterday's news and you have to reinvent yourself it's it's a career for for people who don't mind that who you know if you if you need security if you need a steady paycheck you know accounting I hear is very good uh in fact almost anything that isn't writing right yeah anything that well except maybe drawing that was probably yes starving artist starving writers be just as uh just as bad so that's part of it one of the questions to ask if you're aspiring writer is uh what if ask yourself what if no one ever bought any of my work what if I'm never going to sell a book or publish a book or a short story are you going to continue to write and if the answer is yes because I have to then yeah then you are a writer and whether you'll sell or not I can't know but uh if there are stories in you that have to get out you want to put them down in paper with whether you ever get the affirmation of a a contract or a book in your hand or being on the bestseller list if you still have to tell your stories then then you're a writer uh if you can give it up then then it probably would be an act of Sanity to to learn accounting or uh something like that all right well thank you so much for coming out and spending time with us here for George RR Martin thank you guys thank you so much

Channel: Flicks And The City

Views: 69,489

Keywords: spoilers, reaction, Flicks And The City, procrastinates, South Park, Red Wedding, death, Conan, George, comic book, Game of Thrones Season 5, Game of Thrones Season 4, Joffrey, finger, NIFFF, health, HBO, comic con panel, collegehumor, trailer, TV, City, panel, season 5, Game of Thrones, And, Comic Con, Winds of Winter, dies, Game of Thrones Comic Con, Flicks, 2015, 2014, season 4, funny, Wedding Planner, The, RR, interview, George RR Martin interview, George RR Martin, Purple Wedding, cameo, Martin

Id: IYTGSzeeb44

Length: 48min 40sec (2920 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 25 2014