George RR Martin on Creating Fictional Worlds

what about your the worlds that you create they're so intricate both of you in different ways you're both known for creating these richly detailed worlds I'm wondering if you do research or what your process is for creating those worlds is it something that requires reading or even sketching maps or something of that nature or do you just dig into the story and start there and I'm interested in hearing from both of you how you write well I think ever since folk poping fantasy does require a map and fantasy fans expect them I expect them to I like maps I even like real world maps and all that but I certainly like fantasy maps at the front of my fantasy books have been set in the secondary world Damon Knight once famously said that he would never read a book with a map in the front so Damon was wrong about a number of things but as well as being a defender of Clarion and write about things well Damon was like Chairman Mao right 51% of the time it's a you win particularly with epic fantasy which of course is what a swarm of Ice and Fire is the the setting is very important those of you who are in creative writing courses literary courses will know about the elements of fiction and you know you'll have teachers probably back in high school to talk to you about character and plot and theme and all of the different elements that go into the short story and setting is usually in that list but it's it's usually way down on the list it doesn't get a lot of attention because if you're writing about the real world or the mundane world that's a science fiction writer would say it's the world that's all around us you don't have to describe what an office looks in a detail people know where an office looks or a living room or so forth or they know what you know what you'll find in New York City or farm in Kansas but if you're really dealing with totally made-up places you know we wouldn't know what the shire looks like except opium tells us what the shire looks like and draw us a map and you see the relations of the place to each other you learn a little about history and how long it's been in place and that gives that gives a verisimilitude to it that is uh equal to a mainstream writer just saying I was born on a farm in Kansas you can't you can't do that without doing some world building in fantasy or science fiction to some extent Tolkien's first breakthrough in America was in the late 1960s he wrote water rings in the 50s but it was published only in hardcover and on in England very few copies made it across this the ocean until a spook discovered that there was a lapse in the copyright laws so they pirated it and put out a unauthorized paperback edition which actually forced okyun to license it to Ballantine Books which put out the authorized Edition and they became enormously popular particularly with young people college students of the 60s and a lot of people I knew had had a poster on their wall a token poster but it it's interesting me coming back what was that poster was it a portrait of Gandalf was it you know Frodo and Sam walking somewhere was it Aragorn with a sword no none of those things it was a map of middle-earth that was the poster that sold millions of copies to the to the students for the 60s middle-earth was a character in that book middle-earth the setting was as vivid as important as everything else and there's been a Tolkien calendar now which has been going on for half a century every year there's a new poke in calendar something that I'm trying to imitate with my Westeros sites and Frederick calendars which been coming out for like 10 years now but you look at the Tolkien calendar and even without reading any legends you know these places you just have to look at the art to do that the painters that the artists are creating okay that's Rivendell that's ministerís that's the Shire oh here's one where they're in the mines of moria totally made-up places well we know what they look like we see an image and then we instantly recognize them just as we see recognized images of Paris or Angkor Wat or you know any of the places that exist in the real world that Taj Mahal toking created his world with such detail that his fantasy places took on a tangible life in our imaginations and live there still and I think all of the great fantasy books do that Narnia we know what Narni is like Oz rummy Howard's Hyborian age and hopefully my own Westeros these places have been built in such detail that there is real to millions of readers as Thailand or Mexico or you know Berlin and that's perfect as far as I'm concerned that's that's very cool and it's I think it is necessary a very strong sense of place and setting for fantasy books it has proof or transferred to a certain extent particularly since in science fiction one of them subgenres that I love the most is the planetary romance where you go to another planet and then the joy of it is the same but different and like Earth but not like her how is it different and it needs to be specific and also if you're doing a novel and a science fiction novel so it isn't set on earth in the present you have what I call the cardboard sets problem from Star Trek the cardboard sets that you what you would want to do is compensate for that by a little bit of a hyper realism where you add more detail and to make sure that you believe in this setting and it isn't the cardboard set behind some kind of an adventure and then in terms of my own longest novel there have been stories about Mars for forever as humans have always been aware of Mars and telling stories about it but they were always just a made-up space until 1976 to a certain extent 1969 but the Mariner passed by during a dust storm so it was 1976 when Mars was handed to us on a platter so the Percival Lowell he got it wrong HG Wells laws bits of Bogdanov all of the great Martian literature after Percival Lowell said he saw canals it was although kind of made-up Mars same with Ray Bradbury with Martian Chronicles it might as well have been Arizona same with you know Edgar Rice Burroughs as Mars is his Percival Lowell's Mars done over and over again but they never had the place and then in 76 then you did have maps it's precisely in the sense of satellite maps in great detail and lo and behold the place was like but not like it was like New Mexico on steroids everything was a hundred times bigger than the earthly feature that was similar to it so that the biggest volcano on Mars would turned out to be a hundred times bigger than Mauna Kea and the biggest canal was a hundred times longer than the Grand Canyon it went and on and on like that there's a noctis labyrinth us is a set of labyrinth like you'd have in a fantasy novel Olympus Mons would stick right up out of the sky so as you climbed the mountain you'd climb out of the atmosphere there's a canyon at what I called the Dover gate where you'd be looking down a depth that would be four or five times deeper than the Grand Canyon at its deepest spot and it's real and that's the thing that I found interesting real but empty as as spectacular as anything a fantasy novelist could make up but the next planet out so that had to be a character and nobody had the opportunity to do that until 76 and there is indeed a bunch of Mars literature in the 1980s but I decided to throw caution to the winds and you know double down on making the landscape of character to just a really beautiful thing

Channel: Aegon Targaryen

Views: 181,368

Rating: 4.9669018 out of 5

Keywords: jrr tolkien, audiobook, stephen king, conan, stephen colbert, collegehumor, game of thrones season 8, trailer, spoilers, leaks, fantasy, science fiction, books, lord of the rings, jk rowling, south park, winds of winter, fan fiction, names, kim stanley robinson, tv show, video, iron throne, jon snow, daenarys targaryen, dragons, a dream of spring

Id: zKzYxdmGvGY

Length: 8min 24sec (504 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/icono_clast]

Two of my favorite authors. Kim Stanley Robinson is amazing

[u/AyJay_D]

Where is the youtube video about finishing fictional worlds?

[u/Morningsun92]

A true legend, hope he’s lend a hand in writing this next season. Last season felt lackluster