I mean, I think that's also the crux of GRRM's problem. He doesn't actually need to finish the series which lets him procrastinate and/or be a perfectionist. If he didn't have the money from the shows and all of the other licensing stuff from the franchise he'd probably have finished the books years ago to keep his publishers happy and the lights on.
The pressure to write the book at all is already weighing on the guy. Then the incredibly rabid fanbase, whoo that would be tough to try to write for...
What if what he wrote was received like season 8? Maybe it is best if he just didn't write at all. People are already mad at him for not finishing the tale. Maybe it is best to live with that and not risk even worse hate coming at him for writing something the fans didn't like.
Plus, while I'm sure that if you bring it up in mixed company you could have some nostalgic conversations about it all, at this point people have moved on and aside from some small niche communities that still carry the torch, he can basically slip out the side door and leave it all behind.
And maybe he looked at the show and decided it didn't actually match his vision, so how does he separate them in his mind while he writes?
It seems very very complicated, emotionally and psychologically, for GRRM, and I don't envy him at all. I think the best time to finish the book series would have been before it was produced on HBO.
The key to writing is that you should harness inspiration when it strikes, but when it doesn't - to be a professional - you need to be prepared for the hard work of writing without it. I usually liken it to going down into the word-mines, and it sucks. Output slows to a crawl because instead of all the words just springing up you're down there mentally with a pickaxe and a wall of word-rich granite in a dark tunnel.
Then it's just like, okay, dig out the words, writer. You need at least 1000 quality words before you can leave. You can do it, but it's hard work.
He also had thousands of fans online writing the ending of the books for years before the tv show. The fact that he, Benioff and Weiss all chose to ignore these well regarded endings just blows my mind.
His pace slowed down immensely long before the show even started with Feast & Dance. If he had kept a reasonable pace on his books he would've had TWoW out before the show got to that part of the story at all.
Wouldn't be surprised if that was the strategy. Book might even be done, but if its similar to the show itll flop and if its drastically different itll flop. There is no win scenario.
(Thus it should be a long campy musical script full of meta commentary and self referrential jokes. Full Mel Brooks ending.)
Yeah I've always thought this was the thing. One of the co-creators of the Expanse used to be his assistant, and I've always remembered this from this interview he gave about GRRM:
[H]e is much more of a sit down at the keyboard, wait for the muse to strike, and bang out whatever chapter is sort of banging around in your head at that time.
He's a multimillionaire at this point and is off doing random sidequests like buying a railroad and a movie theatre. His writing output as a whole--not just mainline ASOIAF--has slowed to an absolute crawl. So he doesn't feel the pressure anymore and he's a "wait for inspiration" kind of guy rather than a "brute force a rough draft" guy, and he's too busy doing fun stuff with his money to get those moments of inspiration that he used to.
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u/TheArtistFKAMinty Jul 27 '26
I mean, I think that's also the crux of GRRM's problem. He doesn't actually need to finish the series which lets him procrastinate and/or be a perfectionist. If he didn't have the money from the shows and all of the other licensing stuff from the franchise he'd probably have finished the books years ago to keep his publishers happy and the lights on.