George's Citadel

Interviewer: At one point Greywind characterizes Ghost as the quiet one who was "one of them but not one of them." Since the direwolves seem to reflect the children, does this characterization of Ghost mean that Jon is somehow a part of but still separate from the people around him?

George: Oh yes, I think that's always been true. Even in Winterfell, as a kid before the wolves, Jon was the bastard. He was the odd one out. The rest of them are all brothers and sisters. He's only a half-brother, so he's not as closely tied to them. In some circumstances he could share everything with his brothers, he could train with Robb and all that, but then another circumstance would come up (like when the king came to the castle and they were choosing who could sit at the high table) and he's not welcome there. So he's of them, he's part of the family, he's part of the siblings, but he's a little bit apart too. Ghost is very similar to that. He's the albino, he's the one who makes no noise, so he's related to the other direwolves but one apart as well.

Fan: Which of your characters would you say is the most suitable to be a leader nowadays, and why?

George: Probably Tyrion. Tyrion is very smart. He's also very ruthless, sadly, which you need. I don't know necessarily that he'd be a beloved leader, but he has the intellectual ability to do it. He has a certain understanding of politics and a lot of experience in the dark side of humanity, so he wouldn't be too naive for the job. He might be a good choice. Dany would also be an interesting choice if we could bring her dragons along. The recent American election might have turned out very differently if Hillary Clinton had dragons.

Interviewer: Let's talk about The Hedge Knight novellas. What inspired you to write those originally?

George: I had written and published A Game of Thrones, and I was working on the second book, A Clash of Kings, which, of course, was late. But Bob Silverberg, a friend of mine — one of the great writers and editors in the field of science fiction — had sold an anthology called Legends. It was an all-star collection full of the biggest names in fantasy, in particular: ten original stories set in the universes of ten of the biggest fantasy writers in the world. Robert Jordan was in there, Stephen King, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. Le Guin… really an all-star lineup of people... and me, who really didn’t belong in there at that time. I had one book out that had done pretty well, but my second book was not out yet… So I signed a contract to write an original Westeros story. It had to be a Westeros story. And then, afterwards, I said, “Oh, God, what do I do? I don’t have a Westeros story for him. I can’t! I’ve not finished this story yet. How can I write, like, a Tyrion story? Then it would give away what happens to Tyrion in later books.” So I said, “No, it’s got to be a prequel.” For a long time, I didn’t know what it would be. But then the idea came to me for what would become The Hedge Knight… beginning with Dunk. I wanted to tell a story that focused, to some extent, on the smallfolk, as I call them, the people who were not lords... They were not contending... They weren’t going to get the Iron Throne unless everybody else in Westeros died... With all these things that are going on— the civil wars and the magic, and the threat of the Others or the White Walkers in the North — how does that affect ordinary people? So I started writing what would eventually become The Hedge Knight.

Interviewer: Game of Thrones was one of the best fantasy series of all time and widely acclaimed and loved by many. I think most people here have seen the ending…

George: Eh (audience laughs). I have said in other places, but I'll just repeat it here. The books are not going to end that way. They're not. The main regret I have is the books aren't done yet. And I honestly really never thought that would happen. By the time we sold these books to HBO, I had four books already published, and I was making a lot of progress on the fifth book. How could they possibly catch up to me? But they did. And a great part of that is my fault.

Interviewer: I'm not going to ask you whether you like the way the show ended or how the books are going to end, but if you could maybe provide constructive criticism, because the final season received mixed reviews… What do you think could have been improved in the final season, just as a storyteller, as an author?

George: I really can't answer that without giving away what I'm planning. I've always said there are two kinds of writers in the world: the gardeners and the architects. I know many architects; they plan their novels or their series like an architect designing a building. If you've ever known an architect and they're building a new building, […] they have everything decided. It's all there before they drive the first nail or dig the first hole. And there are writers like that who have everything laid out. And then there are gardeners who are like, "Ah, yeah, I think I'd put a oak tree here. Let's dig a hole." And, "Oh, maybe I don't want an oak tree. Maybe it'd be better if it's a willow. I don't know. I'll change my mind." And then they water it with their blood, in the case of writers. And something grows or it doesn't grow or it grows crooked, and then they get another idea and they add to it and it comes alive that way. There's no writer that I've ever met who's 100% an architect or 100% a gardener. It's always a mixture. But you do lean to one or another. And I'm definitely a gardener.

Of course, you don't actually say how this online relationship turned out. There are certain perils in getting too close to blond women named Cercei, no matter how they spell it.

Fan:  What is your favorite line in ASOIAF? George: I can’t single out one line but my favorite passage is Septon Meribald’s speech about war in… what was it?  (crowd yells out A Feast for Crows).

- George R.R. Martin, ConCarolinas Q&A (2014)

Interviewer: Do you have a favourite scene where you felt the writing really hit home?  George: I remember there’s a speech that a septon (the Westerosi version of a priest) gives to Brienne about broken men and how they become broken. I was always pretty pleased about writing that.

- George R.R. Martin, The Guardian (2019)

John Hodgman: What is your favorite scene that you have written? George: Boy, my favorite scene… The Red Wedding has to rank up there. It took a lot out of me, it was hard to write, but it's a powerful scene that seems to affect everyone who reads it. But there are other things, sometimes, that I think a writer will respond to and love, that the readers don't necessarily even notice. In one of the later books, there's a scene ("Broken Men" Speech) where Brienne is out searching for Sansa, and she meets this Septon who's traveling around with his dog, and he's asked if there are broken men in the woods. Are they dangerous? Are they the same as bandits? And he gives this fairly lengthy answer about what a broken man is, and how they got broken. I was very pleased with that. It's a monologue, a soliloquy. I think I captured something there, and some of the readers have responded to it. I don't think it's in the show — they probably dropped it, or something like that. But, yeah, that felt good.

The Targaryens have heavily interbred, like the Ptolemies of Egypt. As any horse or dog breeder can tell you, interbreeding accentuates both flaws and virtues, and pushes a lineage toward the extremes. Also, there's sometimes a fine line between madness and greatness. Daeron I, the boy king who led a war of conquest, and even the saintly Baelor I, could also be considered "mad" if seen in a different light. And I must confess, I love grey characters, and those who can be interpreted in many different ways. Both as a reader and a writer, I want complexity and subtlety in my fiction.

- George R.R. Martin, So Spake Martin (1998)

The Targaryens were not gods; they were people. But they were people with a very particular heritage and very particular abilities that could be both very good and very bad. There were good ones; there were bad ones. Some of them were mad. They were all the product of generations of incest. You get people of extraordinary ability and extraordinary physical beauty — a Targaryen hallmark. They had certain physical attributes, like purple eyes and silver-gold hair, that were much prized and considered more beautiful than the run of normal men. But you also get madmen, or people who are troubled in one way or another.

The Imp is me in spades, the horny little bastard.

- George R.R. Martin, Torcon Speech (2003)

The book I'm working on now (A Dance With Dragons) is going to have an awful lot of the characters that that aren't in A Feast for Crows, it's going to have a lot of Jon Snow, a lot of Daenerys, a fair amount of Davos, and it's going to have have a lot of "me" - Tyrion.

- George R.R. Martin, So Spake Martin (2007)

Tyrion is most like the personality I would like to have. He's relentlessly intelligent, iconoclastic, funny, and witty. I'm not nearly as witty as Tyrion. Well, I am as witty as Tyrion because I invent all of Tyrion’s witty things, but, on the other hand, I'm much slower than Tyrion. I think of the witty thing to say when it's too late to say it. I'm a slower version of Tyrion, and somewhat taller. But, actually, the character who I am probably most like in real life is Sam. They're all partly me, but I'm probably more like Sam than I am like Tyrion. Sad to say… Or good to say, depending on your point of view. I'm less likely to chop up a singer and put him in a stew, as Tyrion has been known to do, though I would like to have a friend like Bronn to kill people who annoy me. That would be good. Then we could teach some of these internet trolls!

- George R.R. Martin, Eastercon (2012)

Tyrion is the character I’ve always had the easiest time writing. Maybe that’s the character I wish I could be, in a sense, despite all of his drawbacks. But of course I’m obviously not Tyrion. Tyrion has a wonderful wit to him, and he throws off witticisms every moment that take me weeks to come up with. I have to rewrite them four times, before I get the line just right. In real life, I’m always the guy thinking, “Ah! That’s what I should have said!” But I only think of it three weeks later. The character I’m probably most like in real life is Samwell Tarly. Good old Sam.

Thank you for posting! <3

Religion is pretty much there in Westeros. The Faith of the Seven does have a pope — it's the High Septon — but we're seeing in the course of the books what’s happened. The High Septons who were in when the story begins were kind of corrupt High Septons who liked to sit around their palaces, eat chocolates, and diddle little boys. But in the process of that, they have been replaced by the character they call the High Sparrow, who is a reforming zealot with a very different and more fundamentalist attitude toward some of these beliefs. Cersei is discovering, to her dismay, that he can’t be treated the same way as the previous corrupt ones. […] There’s a lot of material in The World of Ice and Fire about what happened to the Faith when the Targaryens took over, and the war between Aegon’s sons and the Faith Militant, which leads up to why things are the way they are in the present day.

- George R.R. Martin, 92NY Plus (2014)

The Faith of the Seven is having what you could only call a reformation movement and has become very corrupt by the time A Game of Thrones opens. The High Septon, who is the equivalent of the Pope, is a fat, sensual man, and when that High Septon is removed then it’s time to elect a new pope. The common people are called “sparrows.” One of them, who is handpicked by Cersei, becomes High Septon, and, of course, he gets called the “High Sparrow.” Cersei and the lords of King’s Landing find they have a person who wants to serve the poor, who’s cleaning out the corruption. In order to get what she wants, she allows him to revive the Faith Militant. Hundreds of years before the Targaryen arrival, the Faith had military arms with which they enforced their will — essentially these fighting monks. By allowing the Faith to take up arms again, you’re seeing the recreation of these fighting forces of young men pledged to the personal defense of the Faith and the High Septon. Suddenly, there’s a whole new player in the game.

- George R.R. Martin, Game Of Thrones Commentary (2014)

The Sparrows are my version of the medieval Catholic Church, with its own fantasy twist. If you look at the history of the church in the Middle Ages, you had periods where you had very worldly and corrupt popes and bishops. People who were not spiritual, but were politicians. They were playing their own version of the game of thrones, and they were in bed with the kings and the lords. But you also had periods of religious revival or reform — the greatest of them being the Protestant Reformation, which led to the splitting of the church — where there were two or three rival popes each denouncing the other as legitimate. That’s what you’re seeing here in Westeros. The two previous High Septons we’ve seen, the first was very corrupt in his own way, and he was torn apart by the mob during the food riots (in season 2). The one Tyrion appoints in his stead is less corrupt but is ineffectual and doesn’t make any waves. Cersei distrusts him because Tyrion appointed him. So now she has to deal with a militant and aggressive Protestant Reformation, if you will, that’s determined to resurrect a faith that was destroyed centuries ago by the Targaryens.

One of the things that the show (Game of Thrones) has done in the second season is expand on Robb's adventures in the west considerably. Robb is not a viewpoint character ever in the books, and his story is presented primarily through the viewpoint of Catelyn when he's in the south, and partly through the viewpoint of Bran when he's still at Winterfell. So, when Robb goes west and has his battles with the Lannisters and his encounter with Jeyne Westerling and so forth, some very important things happen there, and we just hear about them through raven reports. If I had to do it over again, I might go back and promote Robb to a full-fledged viewpoint character and add a whole sequence of chapters where we would actually see what's happening. I could see gaining something from that, but it also has some negative effects, of course. The way the book reads currently, you don't know what Robb's up to, so when he actually comes back to Riverrun and we hear what he's done from Cat’s viewpoint, it has enormous impact because it comes as a total shock to her and, therefore, to the reader who's learning these stories through her. You blunt that if you introduce him as a viewpoint character, so you have to weigh those kinds of options together. [...] It's a good thing these books are published occasionally, or I would keep revising them forever in my effort to achieve some sort of Platonic perfection. The problem is, there is no such thing as Platonic perfection, so I make a choice and I have to live with it. The one viewpoint character that I wonder whether I should have made a viewpoint character is Arys Oakheart in A Feast for Crows, because he's only a viewpoint character for a single chapter. Maybe I should have presented that from Arianne's viewpoint, because the scene is mostly Arianne and Ser Arys, but I wanted to show what was going on through his head and why he made the decision that he made, which I thought was important.