A Point of Interest
Recently, George R.R. Martin
appeared with fellow fantasy author Robin Hobb at an event in London’s
Freemasons’ Hall. With over 50 books between them, each has a distinctive
approach to writing. I thought it would be a great idea to share some of the
highlights from a question & answer session with you, as their answers
provide some great pointers for new and aspiring writers.
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On their first stories.
“I never
finished any of my early stories. They were all beginnings, an endless number
of beginnings.” – George R.R. Martin
“I was dressed up as a witch
for Halloween, and wanted to write a story about my black cat before I went out
trick-or-treating. I think it went out with the trash the next day.” – Robin
Hobb
“The best writing advice I had
was in ‘Heinlein’s Rules for Writers’ by (American science fiction author)
Robert A. Heinlein. His first rule is that you must write, and I was already
doing that, but his second rule is, ‘You must finish what you write,’ and that
had a big impact on me.” – George R.R. Martin
“I had these cheap alien toys
and I made up stories for them. They were space pirates. They didn’t have names
so I made up names. These were the first stories I wrote. Even as a little kid
I was thinking about torture.” – George R.R. Martin
On childhood.
“We never went anywhere because
we had no money and we had no car, but I would look out the living room window
and see the lights of Staten Island. It was incredibly romantic to me, like
Middle Earth. Of course, the danger is you eventually get to Staten Island.” –
George R.R. Martin
“I began reading everything in
the family library. Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe. And of
course, if you’re running out of books to read you can always read
Shakespeare.” – Robin Hobb
“Reading. That was the sport I
was good at.” – George R.R. Martin
On their first professional
work.
“It was a story called ‘The
Hero’ which I sold to Galaxy magazine in 1970, for $94.” – George R.R.
Martin
“I began attempting to write
for children under the mistaken assumption that writing for children was easy.”
– Robin Hobb
“I was a journalism major, and
I would take creative writing classes as part of that, but I would also look
for opportunities to write stories for some of my other classes. So for my
course in Scandinavian history, I asked if I could write historical fiction
instead of term papers. Sometimes they’d say yes.” – George R.R. Martin
On writing.
“It’s different for every
writer. It’s not a career for anyone who needs security. It’s a career for
gamblers. It’s a career of ups and downs.” – George R.R. Martin
“Very little about being a
writer is signing an autograph. It’s sitting in a room and writing. Getting it
out.” – Robin Hobb
“I agree. The main thing is the
stories. Ultimately you want to get back to that room, back to your people.” –
George R.R. Martin
“I’ve been very lucky. There
were times when I was afraid I would never sell another book, but I never
doubted I’d write another book.” – George R.R. Martin
“It’s being ready to accept
rejection. You can work on a book for two years and get it published, and it’s
like you may as well have thrown it down a well. It’s not all champagne and doing
interviews with The New York Times.” – George R.R. Martin
“It’s like chasing butterflies
and trying not to crush them.” – Robin Hobb
“There’s part of me that loves
words. But sometimes it feels like you’re trying to drive nails with your
shoe.” – George R.R. Martin
On editing.
“The biggest doubts come in the
five minutes after I hit send.” – Robin Hobb
“I enjoy rewriting much more
than I do first drafts. Rewriting, at least you have something to work with. I
find writing first drafts extremely difficult.” – George R.R. Martin
“When both my editors say ‘This
is really bad, you need to change this,’ I ignore that at my peril.” – Robin
Hobb
On killing characters and
torturing readers.
“I could have written a story
about a well-adjusted family. Ned Stark comes down to King’s Landing and takes
over and solves all their problems. Would that have been as exciting?” – George
R.R. Martin
“George handles this huge cast
of characters so well. When I get beyond four or five characters, I think,
well, there’s one way to simplify this story.” – Robin Hobb
“The way my books are
structured, everyone was together, then they all went their separate ways and
the story deltas out like that, and now it’s getting to the point where the
story is beginning to delta back in, and the viewpoint characters are
occasionally meeting up with each other now and being in the same point at the
same time, which gives me a lot more flexibility for killing people.” – George
R.R. Martin
On overcoming blocks.
“I will sit there and say, don’t
do that, don’t do that, you’re going to make this story three chapters longer,
and of course he doesn’t listen.” – Robin Hobb on her main character, Fitz.
“Thankfully, I have a lot of
characters. So if I run into a Tyrion problem, I can write with Arya for a
while. Then one day there’s a solution for the Tyrion problem, out of nowhere.”
– George R.R. Martin
On what they’d tell their
younger selves.
“Start writing sooner. Don’t
wait for permission. Don’t hesitate.” – Robin Hobb
“I’d be anonymous. That’s what
I’d do differently.” – George R.R. Martin
On A Song of Ice and Fire.
“I thought it could be a
trilogy. It was initially proposed to be A Game of Thrones, A Dance
of Dragons, and The Winds of Winter. There was a period when I
thought I’d never get to A Dance With Dragons, because the second book
became the third book, and then it became the fourth book, and then it became
the fifth book. The tale grew in the telling. It’s all very well to discuss
some of these things in the outline, but when you sit down to write it, other
plots occur to you, secondary characters come in, you think of an interesting
subplot. Suddenly the stew is much richer, but it also takes more bowls to fill
it up.” – George R.R. Martin
On dreams.
“My
dreams are the usual incoherent nonsense. Like most writers, at some point in
my career I thought, well, I have these great dreams but I always forget them
in the morning so I’ll leave a pad on my bedside table so I can write it down,
and then you have some incredible dream and you write it down and the next
morning you wake up and you’ve written ‘purple socks’.” – George R.R. Martin
On underdogs.
“Everybody
has felt at one time or another that everyone else in the world had a better
shot than they did, so when you engage that, you engage the reader, and I think
you create a character that brings the reader more fully into the story.” –
Robin Hobb
“I’ve
always had a soft spot for the outsider, for the underdog. ‘Cripples, Bastards,
and Broken Things’, as the title of one of the (TV series) episodes goes. The
angst that they have in life makes for more conflict, makes for more drama, and
there’s something very attractive about that. My Game of Thrones is told
by outsiders of both types. None of them fit comfortably into the society into
which they’ve been born, and they’re all struggling to find a place for
themselves in which they’re valued and loved and respected, despite what their
society considers their deficiencies. And out of that, I think, comes good
stories.” – George R.R. Martin
On names.
“Names
are hard. I have a library of What to Name Your Baby books, and I’m
always picking up new books, and books of baby names from other countries. I
like cool-sounding names.” – George R.R. Martin
“I
do know what’s been useless to me is the online fantasy name generators. I’ve
tried those a few times, and they say, ‘Just hit this button and we’ll generate
50 fantasy names,’ and they all turn out to be ‘Grisknuckle’.” – George R.R.
Martin
“A
lot of fantasy names are too much. They’re too difficult to pronounce. I wanted
the flavor of medieval England. I took actual names we still use today, like
‘Robert’, and in some case I tweaked them a little bit. I made ‘Edward’ into
‘Eddard’. If you look back at medieval times, no one knew how to spell their
own names. There are a lot of variations that we’ve lost.” – George R.R. Martin
“There’s
an old writing rule that says ‘Don’t have two character names start with the
same letter’, but I knew at the beginning that I was going to have more than 26
characters, so I was in trouble there. Ultimately it comes down to what sounds
right. And I struggle with that, finding the right name for a character. If I
can’t find the right name I don’t know who the character is and I can’t
proceed.” – George R.R. Martin
Courtesy of Buzzfeed.
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There
you go...some nice little tips and insights in there. I found some of the
answers fascinating, especially regarding what they’d tell their younger
selves. Me? I’d definitely start writing sooner...
What
about you?
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