See, the Dornish stuff is my favorite sub-thread in the books. I think Martin erred with the one-off Oakheart PoV chapter, something I believe he acknowledges, but I love where I think he’s going with the Dornish. The story is so much more complex and fulsome due to the layering of conflicting interests and agendas. The Red Viper is my favorite minor character too, so I was already receptive to learning more about his region of Westeros and his family. And I think the convo between the Dornish prince and his daughter when she’s still imprisoned is some of the best dialogue in the books (book 4).
I don’t think book 1-2 are that spectacular to be honest. I rarely pick up ACoK to reread its sections, there just aren’t that many gems in it. I find myself far more often grabbing books 3-5 for quick bathroom reads over the years. And book 1 has some real pacing issues and odd bits and pieces (Tyrion doing a somersault off a lintel). But they both built into book 3, where some great events occur and everything flowed so well (I think Anne Groell, his editor, deserves a lot of credit here). I think to me it’s clear Martin was doing it again with books 4 + 5, which are unfairly judged because the story slid into its 2nd act and the action and pace slowed down. But book 6, if he ever finishes the damn thing, has the potential to rival book 3 in terms of story and events that move the narrative while providing great set pieces for action and character interaction. We’ll see. I’ll mea culpa every defense I’ve ever mustered if WoW releases and falls flat.
The first time was in season 4, when Jon took on the Night Watch traitors at Craster’s keep. The Night King appeared in a scene, receiving one of Craster’s children.
The Night 's King is a character in the books. He’s a Night’s Watch commander than went mad.
The Night King is the TV’s shows big-bad White Walker. Whereas in the books they’re (currently?) just a misc group of “Others” with no known leader.
I don’t know if the fact that the TV show chose to use an almost indistinguishable title from another character means they’re the same person (i.e. GRRM told them) or if they just thought the title was cool and merged a bunch of stuff (i.e. Yara/Asha)
Books 4-5 bored me to tears and beyond, and I was very into the first three books, having taken me back into fantasy after 20 years of not reading anything in the genre. I was a fan when I was starting book 4, I decided not to read fantasy again for a while when I finished book 5. I found them an insufferable, uninspired mess and by the end I had to read some passages diagonally. So, for me, all the talk about Martin’s plot and writing quality over the show’s writers reads as a cruel joke. And least in the show they derail things much less and respect my precious time. So yeah, I liked the show version of books 4 and 5 way better.
And I do not have any hope Winds of Winter will be any good at all, specially because all the production problems of books 4 and 5 that made them the disaster they are (unmotivated author, lack of editorial control, stupid length that allows to use the book as a weapon…) seem to be still there and even worse. I hope we get it, because I’m morbidly curious as to what useless tangent will prevail over a clear and respectful plot, but given the evolution of the books I think there’s a fair chance the show will remain a better telling of that part of the story too.
We are never getting the ending in book form, so season 8 will remain the only version of that. But if we did get a mythical book 7 (or probably even 8, given Martin’s lack of control over pacing) there’s a very good chance it would be an incoherent rambling that still followed the same main overarching narrative as the series, if only you could distinguish it between all those words.
This is exactly what I think is happening. The show is hurt by having to end so many plots so relatively quickly and GRRM is freaking out that his ideas for the final books aren’t going to work after seeing them in abbreviated fashion on the show. But if given the proper time to run their course in the books they would be fine. And I don’t think he sees that.
So this. Although I didn’t mind Book 4 as much as it seemed to be a decent opening to the next phase of the story after the opening story was complete. But man Book 5 was so, so bad. Bad plot; bad writing; bad characters. I have no desire to ever read that book again while I will sometimes look again at feast for crows for a few POV chapters.
I don’t think history will be kind to Martin’s written work and it will remain best known for the role of Ned Stark/Red Wedding and subverting traditional expectations. Martin also may be known for creating imitators including folks who start epic sagas but then never finish them.
Well at least this makes me feel a little better about the screenwriters. They had to not only finish up without GRRM, but also to make sense of what you guys claim to be fairly messy/crappy writing in the later books. No wonder they gave up on all the Dorne stuff, I guess.
One more who basically gave up on ASoIaF after Book 3.
Honestly, you just need to read the story of how AFFC and ADWD were written, to understand what a total mess they are. Given that he doesn’t appear to have learnt anything from that fiasco, I don’t have much hope that the rest will work out better.
I’m pretty sure we’ll see a Book 7 (and maybe even 8) - although I agree that it is very unlikely GRRM will be the one to write them. But there’ll be so much money left on the table just waiting to be collected that GRRM’s heirs will eventually find someone to finish ASoIaF, Wheel of Time/Brandon Sanderson style if he is unable to. No question about that.
I thought of checking Martin’s writing performance compared with the record of the New York NFL teams and discovered that someone’s already looked into this (because of course they have):
I will agree that books 4-5 left a lot to be desired after the first three books. Had book one ben anything like book four or five we probably wouldn’t be talking about the series now.
The Wikipedia pages for the books cover this pretty well, I think; if you want the gritty details you have to dig into the GRRM’s blog posts. The most relevant one is probably this one:
GRRM and editor agree that book should be a shorter book than the overly lengthy Book 3. Plan is to continue story five years after the events in ASoS.
Decides to do a new book to fill in the gap instead: A Feast for Crows.
New book is even longer than ASoS - decides it needs to split up. AFfC is published at 750 pages.
A Dance of Dragons continues growing and growing. Ends up being published at 1016 pages, despite substantial amounts of material being pushed to the next book. So, what was intended to be a <700 page book eventually ended up at 1766 pages 11 years later.
I mean, maybe that’s creative genius? More likely, I suspect, it’s a case of an author become too famous for his editors to rein in (GRRM is not the first case I’ve seen of a suddenly popular author whose books suddenly become more and more bloated), who’s lost his way somewhat during the process - something he admits himself (what he refers to as the “Mereenese knot”).
GRRM himself is not completely oblivious to the possibility:
But read his own thoughts and make your own judgement.
Thanks! I think it’s really important to have a strong editor or even another author who can provide strong criticism. Reading the blog entry, clearly at the end of the book, GRRM thought he had something good. He needed good feedback and didn’t get it.
I’ve seen it happen many times. It takes different shapes.
0- The work is just bad. Everybody involved knows it but there’s nothing they can do about it. It needs to be released. Very common since creative processes are hard to predict.
1- It can be an assholish creative deciding he’d had enough with “stupid people” telling him what to do now he can do something about it.
2- It can be that a creative surrounds himself with “yes men” who know the output is crap, but will never tell him to avoid imperiling their position.
3- It can be a genuine reality distortion field, where the people surrounding the creative are fans of the person or the work, and can’t see what’s in front of them, because they want it to be good so bad.
I think here we are looking at number 3, perhaps with a smothering of 2 now the TV series millions are rolling in.
A rarer alternative is a creative thinking the work is crap when it’s actually really good, and she keeps redoing it to “improve” it, destroying it in the process. Only seen this one in person, but it happens. Here the team surrounding the creative should force him to release/move on. This might also apply here.
I’m actually a fan of most of Books 4 and 5. But I still think the mentioned 5 year jump after the end of Storm of Swords was the better plan. The book tied up enough narrative loose ends that it was ready and primed for a five year jump.
I think a lot of problems stem from that. So many of the details that he toiled over, you don’t have to toil over those kind of details if you do a five year jump, you can just tell the reader that this is what happened. And you can fill in the details at will, for only the things you want to describe.
It might be as simple that worldbuilding is great, but eventually you need to get on with the story, you can’t just keep adding details and characters and history, yes, yes, that’s all great, but now I kinda want to read the rest of the story I’m invested in, not new stuff from a side character I don’t care about.
I’ve very, very rarely encountered a 700+ page book that wouldn’t have been just as good, or better with some trimming of superfluous plotlines and digressions. I own a lot of books at or about that length. I love a lot of those books. But most of them would still have benefited from tighter editing.
GRRM suffers from that problem and that goes for the entire series (much as I love the first three books, even they spend a fair amount of time just meandering around). It’s just gets way more pronounced as the series goes on (e.g., we go from 8 POV characters in the first book to 18 in the latest, and… all of those are really needed?) and I doubt that there’s more to it, than the common tendency where a person’s great success means the people around them are much less likely to second-guess their decisions.
I read all 5 books pretty close together. I got into GoT in the summer of 2009 or 2010, shortly before the show was announced. I read the first book in like a weekend, I could not put it down. I got through 2 and 3 in the next couple months as I was able to get them. My buddy told me that book 4 was bad, but I devoured it anyway. I remember it being slow but still enjoyable.
Book 5 I picked up before heading on a cruise. I even have GRRM’s signature in it, I got it at a release book signing. My plan was to chill in the sun and read the book. I was bored for most of it, the Tyrion chapters were so goddamn ponderous. I like didn’t want to finish it, but I did out of obligation. The cliffhangers at the end brought the excitement back up but I’d say 50% of the book was pointless and could have been cut. Everything on that goddamn river could have been done in 1 chapter. All the shit with the Greyjoys and the Dornish I hate-read. It was so dull and didn’t contribute at all to the main story I was interested in.
If he ever does write another book (he won’t), I hope the undead are more of a threat than they were on the show.
