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Introduction
George R.R. Martin was a boy trapped in a 5-block neighborhood imagining the outside world and all the mysteries it could contain. He grew up and saw the world beyond, but that only left him imagining what lay beyond that. A science fiction and fantasy lover at heart, Martin has created one of the most beloved fantasy epics since Lord of the Rings. Seeded with political machinations and realistic characters that left us wanting more, he’s captured readers across the world, even as he takes his time writing it. George R.R. Martin turns 76 today and has single handedly dominated fantasy for the last decade despite the constant delay of the 6th book in A Song of Ice and Fire. It speaks to the quality of his work, and the imagination he has induced in readers that his unfinished series stands so strong in the public imagination.
George R.R. Martin's History
Born September 20, 1948, George Raymond Martin grew up in Bayonne, New Jersy. His family was poor, they didn’t even own a car, and Martin lived in a world that was 5 blocks long. From 1st street, where he lived, down to his school on 5th street. Locked in, and with no hope of seeing beyond his world, Martin turned to books and his imagination to fill in the gaps. While he read about the outside world, it was making up stories that let him travel the world.
Martin wasn’t content with places that were real and found himself drawn to the “weird stuff,” as his father put it. Science Fiction and Fantasy were rare in the 50s, and Martine devoured it all. Not just well-known shows like the original The Twilight Zone, but also shows that have been lost from our cultural memory like Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Rocky Jones, Space Ranger in particular was hugely influential on Martin, who considers it a precursor to Star Trek. Martin spent his childhood writing his imagined stories and selling them to other children in the neighborhood, until he was told to stop becuase he was giving them nightmares. At 13 he officially became George R.R. Martin when he chose to take Raymond as his confirmation name in honor of his father.
In Highschool Martin was confronted with the economic reality of being a writer. Some of his relatives encouraged him to enter a more lucrative profession, like plumbing, and write his stories on the side, but Martin took a middle path and specialized in journalism. He attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1970, and his master’s degrees in journalism in 1971, which was the same year he sold his first short story, The Hero, published in Galaxy magazine’s February 1971 issue. Only two years later he was nominated for both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award for his story, With Morning Comes Mistfall.
After years of critical success, Martin encountered an unexpected and devastating flop. The Armageddon Rag, 1983, was a commercial failure. Worse, it was expected to be his first bestseller, making the commercial backlash even worse. In the wake of the flop, no one wanted to publish his books, and it nearly destroyed his career. Martin was only saved by Producer Philip DeGuere Jr. Ironically on of the few fans of The Armageddon Rag, he brought Martin on to write for a reboot of The Twilight Zone and got him started working in television
Martin spent several years working in television, but returned to novels in 1991, with the first book in A Song of Ice and Fire, A Game of Thrones. Originally planned as a trilogy, the story ballooned, and he released A Clash of Kings in 1998, A Storm of Swords in 2000, and A Feast of Crows in 2005. In 2007 the series was picked up by HBO for a television adaptation, which Martin was heavily involved with. The adaptation premiered in 2011, to huge success and ran 8 seasons, enjoying widespread popularity for most of its run. The most recent book in the series, A Dance with Dragons, was also released in 2011. Martin continued to work on many projects throughout the years, and in 2018 Martin released Fire & Blood, a prequel novel for the series.
George R.R. Martin's Writing Style: Becoming the Character
George R.R. Martin writes with a tightly composed 3rd person narrative using whichever, and as many, characters he needs. In A Game of Thrones alone he has 9 POV characters, the number rising with each subsequent book in the series. By switching his POV Character so often, Martin is able to better understand the thoughts and motivations that drive his characters to war. Conflicting views of the world can be presented and dissected to give the reader the most informed take on the world and characters. Martin’s tight prose and propensity for unexpected outcomes play off this, allowing us to see both sides of a conflict and understand their motivations. But Martin retains the ability to surprise his readers by strategically withholding information, or allowing events to play out in an unexpected way.
A Song of Ice and Fire: The Influence of History and Consequences
Games of Thrones was such a ubiquitous cultural touchstone during the 2010s that it’s difficult to say anything new about it or its source material. No one is safe. Major characters will die. Satisfying character arcs will be torn away before they can be completed even as other characters arcs develop from that loss. Bad people will prosper. Good people will suffer. The TV show was good until season 8. The 6th book isn’t out yet. And through it all, you never know how it will end.
Perhaps one of the series’ lesser known aspects is the inspiration it draws from a range of historical events, such as War of the Roses. The War of the Roses saw two cadet branches of the English throne, York, and Lancaster, engage in a series of civil wars with a high turnover rate of weak and downright evil rulers. The conflict gets its name from the white and red roses that represented York and Lancaster respectively. The surface level similarities should already be apparent between Lancaster and Lannister, or how the house colors of York and Lancaster are the same as Stark and Lannister. The connections go deeper, with the series trademark brutality reflected in the battle of Towton, 1461. Considered the bloodiest battle ever on British soil, forgotten bits of dead men are still being found by archaeologists. It brings to mind the brutal battles fought in Westeros.
Building on this historical groundwork, Martin weaves his own tapestry of choices and history that makes his world feel as though you’re reading about it in a textbook. The Targaryens are overthrown and Daenerys grows up as an orphan, dependent on her abusive brother. Jon Snow is a bastard child, limiting his prospects, and leading him to take a position at the Wall. Neither of their lives are defined by their own choices, but the choises made by the generation before them. Martin uses the past actions of his characters to create a history and culture that feels like a step to the left of our own.
All of this is exemplified by A Song of Ice and Fire’s exquisite politics. The Red Wedding cuts deeply through the narrative, acting as a multilayered example of the series political complexity, history, and culture. The wedding is happening at all because Robb Stark’s decisions have lost him the confidence of half his army. He needs this alliance with Walder Frey in order to continue the war. However, this alliance has already been broken. He’s snubbed Walder Frey already, and the marriage is an attempt to repair that relationship. Robb trusts he’ll be safe during the wedding because of cultural guest rites. But Walder doesn’t need Robb the way Robb needs him, and he would rather use the opportunity to get revenge for the slight against himself. That Joffrey Baratheon is at war with the Starks and has the ability to protect him from any Norther retribution is the only reward Walder Frey needs to turn against Robb, break cultural rites, and use the wedding as a chance for revenge.
Not only is the massacre at the wedding retribution for Robb Stark’s previous actions, when he reneged on his promise to marry one of Walder Frey’s daughters, but it is narratively shocking. The death of Catelyn Stark steals away one of the reader’s original point-of-view characters. It serves as a reminder that even our main characters, whose deepest thoughts we get to see, are not safe from the grindhouse of war, and that war plays out as much in political talks as on the battlefield. If Robb had made different choices, or played a better game of politics, he might have survived.
Further, the death of such important characters steals away potential stories that could have been told with them. If the Red Wedding hadn’t been such a master stroke of storytelling that resulted from the consequences of previously established character choices, and effectively ended the war between the Starks and Lannister’s, it would have been the event that killed Robb and Catelyn, and so many more characters, for little more than shock value. It is because the massacre makes perfect political sense and ends the war, serving the larger story and moving the status quo forward, that the narrative sacrifice of these characters is more valuable than the potential stories that could be told if they survived. It is from defining moments like this, that history is woven.
The actions at play are so vivid and realistic, that it calls to mind real political traps and coups throughout history. Caeser was as responsible for his assassination as the senators who stabbed him 23 times. Every senator that stabbed Caeserr believed his dangerous concentration of power was undermining the republic. But his assassination by the senators, an action in direct violation of the principles of the republic, transformed him into a martyr that cast Rome into civil war. Caeser’s actions brought about his death, and the senator’s actions had their own unintended consequences and cast shockwaves throughout history. The same way the actions of Robb Stark and Walder Frey made choices with ramifications for their entire country. It is this same grounded, consequence-based world crafted by Martin that brings A Song of Ice and Fire to life. If not for its clear fantasy setting, it could easily be confused for historical fiction.
George R.R. Martin's Writing Advice: Everything has Consequences
Consequences can seem ephemeral to a writer because the whole project is ephemeral. You needed to make up the world and characters, their actions, and motivations, and you could change it all with a thought. Why isn’t it your responsibility to do the same with the consequences? Because it isn’t ephemeral to the audience.
The world is built out of the choices we make. The collective actions of everyone in the world forge our history. Our history creates our reality. And our reality informs our choices. Your audience has bought into the reality of the story you’re telling, and they want to believe it so much, they’re willing to suspend their disbelief. To them, your character isn’t a name on a spread sheet attached to character traits with a list of plot points they need to perform. They’re real people with meaningful choices and beliefs, and the audience expects these to have consequences for the world that make sense. This is what Martin does so well. He uses his characters’ choices to forge a world’s history right before our eyes. In seeing kingdoms rise and fall as a consequence of the choices people make, it becomes impossible to view the story as anything but real.
Consequences don’t have to mean brutal reality though. Instead, focus on internal consistency within your story. If the characters in a sitcom suddenly get mugged and fight back, you wouldn’t expect one of them to be shot dead. But there should be a consequence to their action. Maybe they actually disarm the mugger by freak accident, and the episode focuses on the 15 minutes of fame they get for doing this. Likewise, in a grounded war story full of politics and soldiers like A Song of Ice and Fire, you might expect the mugger to kill their target if they resist. Or perhaps the target actually kills the mugger in self-defense, and then has to deal with the moral and legal ramifications of that. Your story needs to have consequences, and they need to fit within the tone and scope of the story you're trying to tell, or else your world isn’t making meaningful history, and you’re beating your audience over the head with reminders that the story isn’t real.
What’s He Doing Now?
In recent years George R.R. Martin has written hundreds of pages of the Winds of Winter, the 6th book in A Song of Ice and Fire, though it’s still not close to being finished. He’s also written a prequel novel Fire & Blood, and then gone on to adapt it into another HBO series called House of the Dragon. While he chips away at his most prominent franchise Martin has written regularly on his blog, attended science fiction and comic conventions, and contributed to the various adaptations and spin off of his work. Despite his advanced age, Martin goes as he always has. Writing the stories he wants to see, visiting the places he wants to be, all at his own pace, and damn the consequences.
Discussion Questions
George R.R. Martin has faced harsh criticism from fans of Game of Thrones for the series’ seeming hiatus. Many feel that Martin doesn’t want to finish it or won’t be able to finish it before his death because of his many other projects. As an author, does Martin have an obligation to finish his story?
Although Martin stuck to writing and became a household name, it’s not difficult to see him turning to a more lucrative career if he hadn’t been so successful early on. What is your plan B as an author, and are you prepared to actually carry it out? Or will you stick to writing stories, even if you don’t find immediate success?
Martin uses the choices and consequences of his characters to build his world. What choices have your characters made, and how will those choices impact the world, and the people around them?
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