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George RR Martin asks Stephen King: “How the F do you write so fast?!”
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George RR Martin asks Stephen King: “How the F do you write so fast?!”
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I’m gonna say the drugs did help.
Stephen King to George RR Martin: “How do you write so slow?”
I feel like a man dying of thirst in a desert waiting for GRRM to finish The Winds of Winter
Shouldn’t take four minutes to say “Because I know what my books are about when I write them.”
Has King ever had the pressure to finish a series like Harry Potter or A Song of Ice and Fire?
I know he had his own series in the Dark Tower, but he started that when he was a child and finished it later in his career, and I’m not sure people were banging down his door like they did/do with J.K. and George.
But really, if they want to know how to write quickly, they should talk with Branden Sanderson. That guy knows how to squeeze his creative juices effectively and efficiently
One of the reasons Stephen King is so prolific is that he treats writing as a job and will write every day whether he feels like it or not. Because it’s his job to write. George R. R. Martin seems to treat writing more like an idle hobby.
Some people write. Some un-write.
GRRM has mentioned in interviews how as part of his process he’ll just fall out of love with chapters here and there and then completely discard them. I feel like… he probably does this a lot. I have no doubt he’s physically written enough for Winds of Winter to exist. But something (running into story issues,negative response to the tv show plotlines he was planning to incorporate, whatever) has caused him to chuck a lot of it. I think he’s also running into the problem that endings for things pay the price for narrative mistakes made earlier on in the story. Or as one of my college professors explained “if your act 3 fucking sucks it’s because you screwed up in acts 1 and 2.” Anyway, whatever it is, whatever his reasons, GRRM is an unwriter. One chapter forward, two chapters back.
An example of a writer who probably doesn’t do that? The late Robert B Parker comes to mind. Dude churned out detective books like a machine. I’ve read several of his Spenser novels and you can always tell when he hit writer’s block because there would be a chapter where Spenser would pause working on the case and go home and cook a meal (the process for which would be quite detailed) and chitchat with his girlfriend. These little interludes were clearly the work of a disciplined writer who sat down every day and forced out x pages a day come hell or high water. And the books came out on time.
I enjoy Parker’s books and he was good at what he did. But do any of them hold a candle to “A Game of Thrones”? Not sure they do. But there are many of them and they sold well. No one can say he left his fans out to dry. Could Parker have pumped out the greatest detective story of the 20th century if he obsessed over a single book for a decade? We’ll never know, it was probably not his process. Writers and unwriters…
2 absolute masters of their craft. Would have been wonderful being in the room with them.
I know GRRM gets a lot of hate for the delay, but tbh the story he has written so far and the point at which he has left it, it would take huge skill and good bit of brains to get it to an equally compelling and quality conclusion.
In simple words, coming up with books 6 and 7 and maintaining the same quality and twists and surprises as before is one mean task.
George sounded like Tony fuckin Soprano howddafuhk
Sanderson and SJM are also monsters of quick writing, it’s extremely impressive. I have no idea how you can even come up with all these complex ideas so quickly let alone write them coherently.
King said once he sits at the computer for 8 hours whether he’s typing nonstop or staring at a blinking cursor.
Cocaine.
I think Stephen King also understands it’s one product of his many. He doesn’t have one series where the result of the book might scare away your fan base like JK Rawlings and George RR Martin.
Also, Stephen King started as a writer selling books based on the word count, so I am pretty sure he knows how to get something out on the page on a timeline.
>You never thought you should have become a plumber?
I feel this so hard. I’ve had this exact thought so many times. Having a career where the work is objective. You know what to do, you know how to do it, and the job you do is either good or it’s not.
Because he focuses on his book not novellas, shows and video games
Ohhh, and King comes back with a huge slap in the chops, Martin is reeling on the ropes, it looks like this write-off is d…
Wait! Who is that?!? I can’t believe it folks, is that… yes! It’s Brandon Sanderson coming off the top of the cage swinging a 3-novel trilogy he wrote an hour ago!
I’d like to put RR Martin’s writing speed into perspective. You could have been born the first day the ‘Game of Thrones’ book was released, grown up old enough to enjoy it 26 years later and still be waiting for an ending. Just the amount of time it’s taken to get between books is why I dropped the series.
“You want to be a writer? Write 5000 words a day, You’re a Writer.” -Steven King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Ive found that compartmentalizing the stages of the craft help. There is a time for imagination and a time for editing. If you can keep the two from mingling, blocks rarely arise. Let the editor edit later, so the writer can freely create new sentences now.
Here is a great bit of advice for folks who want to write… Make character sheets for all your characters.
Write their main quirks.
What they like, what they hate.
Put a notes section in place for their big dislikes, and their grudges…
Track them… because you aren’t going to remember them, but the character sheet will.
Whenever those characters appear, have the sheet handy, because those characters, their traits and quirks are going to write the story.
The most important thing when writing isn’t to force characters that meet the “requirements for the scenario” into the location, in fact, it is sometimes good for characters to lament the fact that “If Smith was here, he would get this lock open in no time, but I guess we have to smash the window”
Characters are allowed to fail, the story is allowed to go off the rails, the good guys can lose the war, even the battle. Villains can be competent, and so can heroes.
Sometimes it is good to have a clash of titans, and build up to a big finale, but if your character sheet says that your main character is the forgiving type that doesn’t have actual reasons for taking on the villain, they can be in a real position to say… “Well they never did anything wrong to me” or even if they did… “Well ya know, that’s just who they are I guess. I don’t want to become corrupted like he is by seeking revenge.”
The problem a lot of writers can have, is “forcing an outcome”. When you force an outcome, the set pieces just magnetically go where they need to go, and that can create problems.
In fact, the fact that a character might be best positioned to take action, but simply doesn’t know to do so, is a really important narrative moment “I was right there, had I known!!!”
At 3:30 he describes what JK Rowling was wearing exactly like I’d expect an author to describe a character. That’s one of the reasons he writes so fast. He’s so damn naturally descriptive.
All people in here praising Sanderson and King for how much they write and forget that Terry Pratchett wrote 70 novels as well.
George: “How do you write a good ending?”
Stephen: “No idea, but at least I write one.”
King has always been upfront about why he’s so prolific. He just sits down and writes. He wrote a whole book about it.
Lol i was watching this wondering how recent it was, then he mentioned JK Rowling and people clapped. *Miiiiight be a few years old then at least…*
I hold a firm belief that King projectile vomits words onto the page for six pages. Gets the first draft out like tequila on a bad night out.
Then edits the fuck out of that like a master chainsaw artist.
As someone who enjoys both King and Martin, their writing styles are completely different and King’s lends itself to much faster writing. Many, many of his stories read as if someone is verbally retelling the story. It’s not just “Joe did this and Bob did that” it’s “Joe, if you believe it, did this, while that sonofabitch Bob did that”.
I think it makes the reader more forgiving to the storyteller in terms of plot, and lets King tell a story without need for significant detail or world building. It just becomes a pure story as you might expect someone to tell it to you over a beer.
GRRM’s books are DENSE. Every detail is a link in a long chain of details. Every word and sentence carefully planned, phrased, and of value. It’s not just a story, it’s a world changing over time.
GRRM did a bit of King’s style with the Duncan the Tall story, and that was fun, too. Much more digestable than the main ASOIAF books.
Both are really enjoyable. One’s cake and the other is a year’s worth of meals.
I get that GRRM has a much more complex world to write in terms of keeping elements of the story consistent and having them make sense, but man this dude just does not seem to treat his writing like a job. King writes fast because he treats it like a job with deadlines and goals and uses conventional writing strategies to accomplish these goals rather than sitting there and waiting for inspiration to strike you. I can almost guarantee that those 6 pages a day that King talks about were probably not very good to start but that he relentlessly beat them down until they were. What I suspect GRRM does, and what he has alluded to, is that he writes a page (if he writes any that day at all), reads it over, and then decides he doesn’t like it and starts over instead of trying to make it work.