George RR Martin reveals major regrets about Game of Thrones books

If only he wrote books as fast as Taylor Swift writes albums

4 months ago

George RR Martin, the author of the A Song of Ice and Fire series that Game of Thrones is based on, has shared regrets about the books.

At an event at Oxford Writers’ House, the author was asked, “If you could change one thing about one of your books, what would you change and why?”

Martin revealed he wished he’d been able to write all the A Song of Ice and Fire books before publishing any of them, so that he could go back and fix things in earlier books that didn’t make sense by the ending.

He “envied” another fantasy writer called Gene Wolfe who had a day job as the editor of an engineering magazine and so could afford to not publish any of his The Book of the New Sun series until he’d written all of them.

“I had no other salary. I lived entirely on the money that my stories and books earned. I couldn’t take six years off with no income. I would have wound up homeless or something.

“But there is something very liberating from an artistic point of view if you inherit a huge trust fund or a castle or something and you can write your entire series without having to sell it, without having to to worry about deadlines. That’s something I would envy.”

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The author then added that he wasn’t taking so long to write the next Game of Thrones book because he now has more money. He said: “Believe it or not, I am not taking all that time to write The Winds of Winter just because I think I’m Gene Wolfe now. I would love to have finished it years ago.”

Martin’s comments feed into speculation that he’s been struggling to write the last two books in the series. The most recent book, A Dance with Dragons, came out in 2011 – the same year as the first season of the Game of Thrones show. It’s taken him 13 years to come up with the next book, The Winds of Winter. That’s even longer than it took me to write my A-level coursework.

Many people speculated that the show’s, ahem, somewhat divisive ending came about because the producers ran out of books to base the script on.

Game of Thrones author George RR Martin reveals major regrets about the books

George RR Martin had to do lots of promotion for the first season of Game of Thrones because Sean Bean was the only famous actor in it (Credit: HBO)

Martin also shared that he regretted his face becoming recognisable. “In the old days… I could go to McDonald’s and have a cheeseburger and nobody would pay any attention to me, but that’s gone now. I probably did make a mistake when we got Game of Thrones going as a TV show. We were using a lot of unknown actors, so they did a lot of publicity with me. That really got my face out there, which wasn’t necessarily the greatest thing in the world.”