George R.R. Martin is still hard at work finishing his series that served as the basis for ‘Game of Thrones’ and despite backlash to the series finale, he won’t be changing his plans for how the story ends…
George R.R. Martin is sticking to his guns.
The highly divisive final season of ‘Game of Thrones’ pleased some fans but there was a very loud majority who were not happy with the way the show ended and a petition was even started at one point asking HBO to film a new version of the show.
Many of the actors and actresses working on ‘Game of Thrones’ have reacted to the backlash but Martin has largely stayed away from placing his opinion — positive or negative — when it comes to how showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss chose to conclude the series. While Benioff and Weiss based many of their decisions on Martin’s original vision, the showrunners also took some liberties that strayed from the source material.
Martin is still hard at work on the sixth novel in his ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series that served as the basis for ‘Game of Thrones’ but he promises the blowback from the TV series won’t alter his plans for how the story ends in his books.
“No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t change anything at all,” Martin told The Observer when asked about changing his story following the backlash to the final season of ‘Game of Thrones’. “You can’t please everybody, so you’ve got to please yourself.”
As much fame and fortune as it brought Martin over eight seasons, he admits that ‘Game of Thrones’ was likely a bad influence on his writing because it slowed to a crawl after the show began airing on HBO.
When the series first launched, Martin expected to stay ahead of ‘Game of Thrones’ in hopes that he would finish his story long before the show came to a conclusion. That didn’t happen because ‘Game of Thrones’ caught up to Martin’s source material before he could finish the sixth book ‘The Winds of Winter’ with a seventh book still planned for the future.
As of now, ‘The Winds of Winter’ still hasn’t been released and there is no date set for the book to hit stores.
“I don’t think [the TV series] was very good for me,” Martin said. “The very thing that should have speeded me up actually slowed me down. Every day I sat down to write and even if I had a good day … I’d feel terrible because I’d be thinking: ‘My God, I have to finish the book. I’ve only written four pages when I should have written 40’.”
Martin will admit that the popularity of ‘Game of Thrones’ exploded interest in his books, which has also led to fans devoting entire websites into theories about the story he’s been telling for more than 20 years. According to 70-year old writer, there are some fan theories that mirror his plans for the books with numerous others that are completely off base.
“Some of [the theories] are right and some of [the theories] are wrong. They’ll find out when I finish,” Martin teased.
If there was one major drawback to the success Martin has found since ‘Game of Thrones’ launched it’s that his anonymity has virtually disappeared and he misses the days when he could just toil away for hours in a bookstore. Sadly, those days are long gone for the author.
“Yeah, honestly I do. I mean, I can’t go into a bookstore any more, and that used to be my favorite thing to do in the world,” Martin said. “To go in and wander from stack to stack, take down some books, read a little, leave with a big stack of things I’d never heard of when I came in. Now when I go to a bookstore, I get recognized within 10 minutes and there’s a crowd around me. So you gain a lot but you also lose things.”
Martin remains hard at work on ‘The Winds of Winter’ with one more book ‘A Dream of Spring’ still planned to close out his ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series.
