G.R.R Martin: "unlike my book characters, the actors expect to be paid money!

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Therefore, in order to introduce a new character at the start of each season, they’ve got to kill some of the old characters off"

Last night, A Game Of Thrones author George R.R. Martin took to the stage at the Sydney Opera House to discuss his popular fantasy series, the spin-off HBO TV show and his craft as a writer. Below are ten kernels of wisdom that could help budding authors write their own fantasy saga. (Surprisingly, ‘take your time’ isn’t one of them.)

Don’t limit your imagination

I knew right from the beginning I wanted the story to be large and complex. Before A Song of Ice and Fire I had been working in television for ten years. Whenever I turned in a script it was a common scene where they would say “George, this is great but it’s too big and expensive; you need to cut it down. You currently have 126 characters — we have a budget for six.”

When I went back to prose, there were suddenly no limits: I could write something huge with all the characters I wanted, with battles, dragons and immense settings. Of course, I thought this will be unfilmable and that I’d never have to worry about Hollywood again. But that’s [Game of Thrones TV producers] David Benioff’s and Dan Weiss’ problem now.

Choose your point-of-view characters to broaden the narrative’s scope

My story is essentially about a world at war. It begins very small with everybody apart from Daenerys in the castle of Winterfell. It’s a very tight focus, and then as the characters split apart, each character encounters more people and additional POVs come into focus.

It’s like if you were trying to do World War 2 as a novel: do you just take one average GI? Well that would only cover the European theatre, not the Pacific. Do you make Hitler a point-of-view character to show the other side? What about the Japanese or Italy? Roosevelt, Mussolini, Eisenhower — all these characters have a unique viewpoint that presents something huge in Word War 2.

So you either need an omnificent viewpoint structure where you’re telling it from the point of view of God, which is a pretty outdated literary technique, or you have a mosaic of people who are seeing one small part of the story and through that you get the entire picture. That’s the path I chose to take.

It’s okay to “borrow” from history

Although my story is fantasy, it is strongly grounded in actual Medieval history. The War of the Roses was one of the major influences, which had the Yorks and the Lancasters instead of the Starks and the Lannisters. But I like to mix and match and move things around. As the famous saying goes; stealing from one source is plagiarism but stealing from lots of sources is research!

Remember: Winter is coming

Valar morghulis — all men must die. I think an awareness of our own mortality is something that concerns most art and literature. But I don’t think that necessarily translates to a pessimistic worldview. Just like in the real world, my characters are only here for a short time; the important thing is that love, passion, empathy, laughter; even laughing in the face of death, is still possible. There is darkness in the world but we don’t have to give way to despair. One of the best themes in The Lord of the Rings is that despair is the ultimate crime. Winter is coming, but you can light the torches and drink the wine and gather around the fire and continue to fight the good fight.

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