George RR Martin on New POV Characters in Winds of Winter

hi so far in the story you've kept expanding the world character by character location by location and you just told us about this a lot of places you've introduced that we won't revisit as readers but all the characters that we haven't been inside the head of as of yet that we will come to know in the point of view you may be again as a Vegas you want about this but we will be exploring new characters that we haven't been inside the head of us of yes my plan is No except of course for the prologues and epilogues where as you know you usually get in the viewpoint of a different point of view character for one chapter however that is subject to change as I as I write the books I encounter problems and sometimes I find that I need a new point of view in order to make it work I mean those of you who follow discussions and conventions and other interviews and some of the things I post on my blog will know that with the last book I had a particular trouble with what I called the Marigny is not with a number of characters arriving in Mereen and I had a bunch of viewpoint characters there already I had Quentyn Martell turning up I had you know Tyrion turning up I had Danny there and I kept you know reworking these chapters and rewriting from different point of view and reordering who arrived first and what happened first and what happened second and I could never really make the pieces fit and make the story flow the way I wanted to until I finally said I'm gonna give Cerberus an a viewpoint he's he's the one I need there to make it make it work make the post a nice tough work you know make it Tyrion at Costa Tyrion didn't even speak the language it was very difficult to write to use scenes where Tyrion was the viewpoint character and he didn't know what the [ __ ] anybody was saying so but having Sorbara stand there suddenly made those things work and you know I may find that is necessary again we'll we'll see but hopefully it won't because I'd actually like to you know as you say the story has been going further and further out but it's it's past time that the story turned that started coming together and that's certainly my overall plan and that's what I'm working on right now but fewer viewpoint characters not more but I'm not gonna make a pledge in blood yes hi my name is Ian Cheney I had a question actually about the writing process for winds of winter because well as we all know peace for crows and dance with Dragon was divided geographically and I was wondering how challenging was it to write win the winter with all this added character and if you feel like you had to shorten some story line well I'm not finished it yet so so that you know who knows what I'll discover by the time at the end but I'm not planning on shortening any storylines I am also not planning on dividing it we're not going to have another set of two parallel books so though the books that did part for those two volumes are or reuniting there will be how do i phrase this between the two books when you put them together there's an access of viewpoint characters so some of them may may not survive the the action to come but you know we'll see about that hi um I was wondering about a medical knowledge of the maesters semesters because for example jamie's hand when it's treated they bring out their the guns the khyber and things have a great knowledge about human anatomy and so on and its history fever standard for masters or is it an exceptional game survives because they suffer some gangrene very quickly well I wanted you know I've made a deliberate decision when the book began to have the maesters and have Westeros in general have better medical knowledge than to realize the Middle Ages mostly because I didn't want everybody dying at 26 and so it is it is generally improved the maesters have improved this the standard of Hygiene and they understand certain practices and they can do things better also though they have magic which doesn't always work because it's magic and magic is unreliable but sometimes it works and you know it brings people back from the dead and things like that so that also changes things and is a adjunct to their general healing skills it's odd though that some of the things that they practiced in the Middle Ages which were later rejected you know like leeches and maggots are coming back because it turns out that they knew more than we thought they did and that uh you know maggots actually can perform a function hey George my name is axel gage and first of all I wanted to say hi for my friend Matt if it couldn't be here today and my question is really a little bit strange because I'm from a city not far from here you may have heard of it it's called Westeros yes I was asked that this morning yeah it's purely coincidence I'm afraid I had never heard of your Swedish Westeros that's like a related one um when you envision your cities specifically like King's Landing or white Harbor those kinds of places do you think of any real-life cities that you compare them to like Stockholm maybe I don't know what do you think those cities look like in your mind why I've never actually been to Stockholm before this so why I couldn't really evoke that you know how to the large extent these are based on obviously not places I've been since I'm another time traveler but they're based on what I've read about actual medieval cities medieval Paris medieval London primarily the ones that are most information is about in it is available in English I wish I could read more of the medieval history of other countries but sad to say those books are seldom translated into English and I have no other languages not even Dothraki I am high Valyrian and a little my name is Martin appropriate it seems and more based your question the dinosaur mice are firing question you mentioned Charles 2/12 and all the other swedish kings and if I recall correctly mentioned you have read scan the name in history at college you know just a general course no but you wrote a short story that was later published as the siege I think about a critical event in Swedish history forgotten mostly about the follows we are born in the liberal thro the North right if you could tell us something of why you wrote that and what the story entailed because it's it gets most people in here and we smear Polly yes I wrote that my sophomore year of college and Northwestern University so I was you know eighteen years old or something like that I was taking a course in Scandinavian history a general survey course and we were assigned to do a term paper but in those days you know I was I was taking courses in creative writing I was trying to sell stories I was sending out science fiction stories of the magazines also writing non science fiction stories and trying to sell those and whenever I took a course I would try to convince the professor to let me write a short story instead of a term paper so I went to that professor in Scandinavian history and said they didn't hey how about I do fiction historical fiction and he said sure so I wrote a a story about the render FEA Borg in the Russia Swedish war of 1808 because it was a great historical mystery that had come across during a survey course and I'd read room Berg's poem about it or the English translation thereof and it seemed like a fascinating subject in hey I got an A on the paper and that was pretty good in 20 years later I rewrote the story and I added a time-traveling dwarf and so that's Omni and got thousands of dollars so so it worked out pretty well the original story had no time-traveling Dwarfs I was speaking I mean you took it's kind of an even history course in college and that was it was that just to fill credits or you do something about its kind of Naevia interested you I mean here you are written well army of Sweden what what interested me was the fact that I knew nothing about it you know I don't know what kind of history you're taught here in Sweden but as a kid in America growing up at least back when I did in the 50s and 60s you know you get American history and then you get a course called Western civilization and it's like you get them over and over again you know you start in grade school and you and you get you know British colonists Jamestown Plymouth Rock American Revolution George Washington Andrew Jackson who here comes the Civil War Abraham Lincoln etc and then you get in in the next year then you get the world history you know the the the Egyptians and and the Greeks and then the Romans and Battle of Marathon and memorizing the dates and then you go forward and you get to you know you get the Crusades and the Middle Ages well the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages and all of that stuff and you follow England mostly and then you go on to like high school and you get the same subjects but just in more detail you know then they tell you all the stuff they taught you in grade school is not actual true you know George Washington didn't chop down the cherry tree and he wasn't standing up when they crossed the Trenton in the boat and all that stuff so you first you get the myths and then you get a little more realistic and then you reach college and you get the same subjects taught over in what in college you also have electives where you can take in the history with my minor so I said I don't want to hear any more about the Romans or the Greeks or the Battle of Marathon or the Battle of Hastings I know all that [ __ ] I've been over it like four times already what's this stuff about Scandinavian I know nothing about them you know I know that I saw the Vikings once and that seems sort of interesting so I'll study that I also took courses in in Chinese history and you know other other exotic courses that covered histories that I had never previously studied and of course I found it all fascinating hi my name is Emma I'm wondering I like reading you're like not a blog dog and you you have so many like interesting and fun projects going on and I'm wondering like like how many projects do you have and where do you find the time to rest do you rest I have a lot of projects I maybe too many projects I don't know I get every time I announce a new when I get angry fans hooray why you're doing something else you should be writing winds of winter I have an overall deal with HBO which means that they pay me vast sums of money to entirely aside from the vast sums of money they're paying me for Game of Thrones they pay me other vast sums of money to invent new shows for them so um I invent ideas and sometimes they say now have we don't like that but other times they say oh that's good and then we go out and we develop the idea and we hire writer and we write a pilot so you know and if they like the pilot they make the pilot and if they like what they make then you have a new show on the air and I like three projects like that that I've invented as part of my overall deal that are in various stages of development one of them actually become television shows I got no clue you know it's it's a crapshoot I mean in the 1990s I spent five years in development working for Columbia Pictures and developing pilots for ABC and the Fox Network and I wrote something I thought were good scripts good shows but not oh never went all the way it's you know many pilots are made and things are done I've got my wild card series which I've been editing for you know decades now it goes back longer than Ice and Fire it's still ongoing and other things come my way you know us and they seem like fun so I work on them but one thing that almost all of these other projects have in common is that I'm not doing the writing or I'm doing a little bit of the writing but somebody else is doing most of the writing they may be based on an old script that I wrote a long time ago there maybe based on a short story for example we are developing the skin trade my novella that I published nightly was 1987 as a potential television series I wrote a novella but other people are writing the the pilot script and so if it goes forward this is the same trick of course I used with Elio and Linda is bring other people with broad and get them to do most of the work and you know that that works works very well although I wound up somehow you turned that on me and I wound up doing a hell of a lot of work anyway so you know I like making stuff up what can I say I've been telling stories since I was a kid and and these new projects are exciting I'd hate to ever think I was just like doing one thing over and over again and you know I hope that some of you guys and some of the other readers out there enjoy the other projects as well as I know you love Westeros and you love Ice and Fire and I do too but I also love my other children and I realize didn't I was popular I hope I never arrived I mean I knew Frank Herbert a little not he wasn't a close friend or anything but I met him a little in the last few years of his life and Frank had actually kind of come to hate Doon by the end because that was all anybody wanted from him and he really wanted to write he had other novels he wanted to write other worlds and characters he wanted to create and his publishers and his fans were just saying we don't care about that just give us another dune novel okay thanks for that one give us another novel okay that was good give us another dune novel and I hope I never wind up in that situation which me I don't have to because you know I'm doing well enough so that when I finish ice and fire I can write it pretty much anything I want and if it only sells three thousand copies I won't give a crap what I hope it won't and actually I don't think even when I finished ice and fire I this story will be finished but I don't think I'll ever be finished with the world obviously I have to finish my sidebars and publish those as the history of the Targaryen dynasty fire and blood and then I have more Dunkin egg stories to write I've only got maybe a third of the way through their careers and and and I who knows maybe I'll write a whole series of things set in et exploring some of the history that I put there so I that's the great thing about creating a world is you have a world to play and not just a particular set of characters

Channel: Aegon Targaryen

Views: 192,957

Keywords: stephen king, reaction, music, ending, finale, a dream of spring, interview, 2019, prequel, the long night, night king, arya, blood moon, jon snow, daenarys targaryen, season 8, episode, release date, shade, david and dan, writing, tolkien, fire and blood, history and lore, dragons, drogon

Id: LlEWdEJ9VrA

Length: 17min 7sec (1027 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 25 2019