/lit/ - Literature

This anecdote dropped by the writer of the Outlander series keeps coming back to me:

https://wikiofthrones.com/george-r-r-martin-delay-the-winds-of-winter-killed-important-character

When George told her " you ever killed somebody off that you later realized you knew you needed?" that seems like a big hint as to what the holdup is. Somebody's dead who now would make the story work a whole lot better, or even work at all, if they were alive.

More than that, this isn't a "recent" death, in that I bet it's not a death that happened in Feast or Dance. If it had happened within the last two books it's something he could probably work around. Like, we all know Jon is going to come back.

The character he killed off that he knows he needs is almost certainly somebody who died in the first three books. Somebody who's been dead so long in book-time that it would be inconvenient and implausible to bring them back. But now he knows he needs them, so he's fucked. He's written himself into a corner he can't get out of.

It's blatantly obvious at this point that the main reason for the delay is that GRRM is reworking the ending of the story. He told D&D the basic outline of the entire story already. We can assume that all the big beats of the ending of the TV show--Arya killing the Night's King, Dany going nuts and massacring people, Jon killing Dany, Bran becoming king--were part of GRRM's original plan for how ASOIAF would end. But when he saw how much people completely hated the ending of the TV show, he panicked, and has been trying fruitlessly to do something different with the ending of the books.

You know, for all that he got attention for asking about Aragorn's tax policy, I'm honestly not sure if George has a very good grasp of economic policy himself.

Like, how the fuck does the Iron Bank of Braavos work? It just... has money? So much money that it can randomly lend to entire kingdoms? It doesn't seem to generate any income, I guess it gets income from interest on loans? Or something?

There weren't even banks as such in the Middle Ages, you had the Templars and that's pretty much it.

I love how the Redwall series is basically A Song Of Ice And Fire for kids, and done right. It's got a shocking amount of violence in it for books aimed at children, and as >>22891700 notes, the descriptions of food put the fat man's own efforts to utter shame.

Is any of his non-ASOIAF stuff good? Is his sci-fi stuff any good? He's become so consumed by these damned fantasy books that everybody tends to forget he's been a writer for a long time and has cranked out a lot of other stuff.

>>22162145
Do you think George ever regrets what's become of him? Sure, he was never really a GREAT sci-fi and fantasy writer, but he was at least RESPECTABLE. This guy was palling around with Gene Wolfe in the 70s and 80s. Now he's basically pop culture nerd Santa Claus and nobody takes him seriously.

>yeah but he's rich

What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, but lose his soul?

So as far as I can tell this is the general consensus on GRRM and ASOIAF:

>GRRM gets bogged down in his own plotlines by the end of Dance/Feast
>also gets lazy because of course he is he's a fat fuck
>show starts, suddenly he's making tons of money, adding an incentive for him to procrastinate
>gets so lazy and so behind that the show catches up to the books
>show starts to use his general outline for how the end of the series is going to go
>Arya killing the Night's King, Dany going insane, Jon killing Dany, and Bran becoming a weird cripple king are all plans he actually had
>everybody who watched the show fucking hated all of these
>GRRM saw the hate and it freaked him out
>now in addition to everything else he's stuck with an ending everybody's already seen and everybody hated
>he's trying to rewrite everything he originally had in mind and it's got him going even slower than he was before
>he may be resigned to dying with the books unfinished, just so he doesn't piss everyone off

Is this basically right? It feels right given what we know.

I'm reading A Game Of Thrones right now and there's a kind of grotesque fatness to the writing.

Let me further explain. I'm right after the chapter where Bran gets hurt. We're at the point where Catelyn is sitting with Bran's broken form bitching at Jon.

Up to this point the most accurate word I can use to describe what I have read is "overwrought." Like, the description of the city of Pentos, with all its heavy metal and light fixtures. And the way the story leers over Danerys' 13-year-old body, making extra sure you know that she doesn't have breasts by having Viserys fondle her buds. And the way the fucking lordling in the prologue is elaborately described with all his fancy-ass black clothing. And how there's always some extra-grotesque detail that the narrative is sure to point out, like the maggots in the eye sockets of the dead direwolf.

It all feels like too much. That's the overwhelming impression I get when I'm reading so far. A grotesque fatness. Like, there's maximalism, but this doesn't feel like maximalism, this feels like a gratuitous stuffing of the narrative with details that don't add anything to that narrative, and don't really function on their own in a way that sets the mood or gives a sense of place. Like details piled on top of details without any of them being given any real weight, and with seemingly no purpose other than to shovel information down our gullets, or otherwise to shock and offend.

I don't know. Like I said, "grotesque fatness" is the descriptor that really comes to mind. Like this book is some immense obese person that GRRM is shoveling cake down the mouth of, deliberately fattening up in a disgusting way for no good reason. There's all this detail but it's all very overwrought and deliberately provocative without having any actual meaningful effect.