For the first four years of HBO’s Game of Thrones, author George R.R. Martin had a writing credit on one episode each season. Those episodes—Season 1’s Lannister coup “The Pointy End,” Season 2’s battle episode “Blackwater,” Season 3’s Jaime and Brienne showstopper “The Bear and the Maiden Fair,” and Season 4’s deadly royal wedding, “The Lion and the Rose”—all marked relatively important moments in the series, and were well-regarded by book-lovers and show-watchers alike.

But that last episode aired in 2014, at the halfway mark of the series—and Martin hasn’t penned an episode since. An early version of the last script Martin wrote is available to the public, along with many others, at the Writers Guild of America Library in Los Angeles, though—and unlike the versions of his earlier scripts in the archive there, this Martin draft of “The Lion and the Rose” differs wildly from what ended up airing on HBO. Changes from page to screen are not at all uncommon, this is just a particularly extreme case. A close reading of this draft may help explain why Martin stopped writing for the show.

Publicly, Martin has said that he stopped writing for Game of Thrones in order to focus on completing the next, long-anticipated book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, The Winds of Winter: “Writing a script takes me three weeks, minimum, and longer when it is not a straight adaptation from the novels. Writing a season six script would cost me a month’s work on WINDS, and maybe as much as six weeks, and I cannot afford that,” he wrote in 2015. “With David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Bryan Cogman on board, the scriptwriting chores for season six should be well covered. My energies are best devoted to WINDS.”

Of course, Martin’s final season writing for the show also coincided with Weiss, Benioff, and HBO crossing some important milestones. Not only did the show take a huge leap forward in popularity thanks to a deft execution of the instantly viral “Red Wedding” in Season 3—a moment Weiss has said they were aiming for since day one—but speaking with Vanity Fair before Season 4, Benioff answered simply “Yup” when asked if he thought the show would soon outpace its source material. (Martin, meanwhile, called the prospect “alarming.”)

But Martin, Weiss, and Benioff came up with a work-around. Between Season 3 and 4, during a now-famous summit in a Santa Fe hotel room, Martin walked the show-runners through his rough outline for the end of his planned saga. “I can give them the broad strokes of what I intend to write, but the details aren’t there yet,” Martin told V.F. at the time. “I’m hopeful that I can not let them catch up with me.”

That didn’t happen—and it seems that Martin and Game of Thrones hit other snags as well. Season 4 is when Martin responded to a controversial, sexually violent scene between Cersei and Jaime on-screen by differentiating the show from his books: “The whole dynamic is different in the show,” he said at the time. “The setting is the same, but neither character is in the same place as in the books, which may be why Dan & David played the sept out differently. But that's just my surmise; we never discussed this scene, to the best of my recollection.”

Martin has also emphasized how writing for television differs from writing his novels. In a 2018 talk on screenwriting, Martin told the audience that Hollywood likes “short dialogue. A line or two. Back and forth, back and forth.” But just as Martin’s books famously get more digressive as they continue, his scripts for the show started to balloon over time: his version of “The Lion and Rose” swells with ornate, detailed, forward-looking description, and in its original form is over 70 pages—20 longer than the average Thrones script. Weiss and Benioff ended up significantly editing it down, as a comparison between page and screen proves, and moving at least one significant scene into an earlier episode in order to fit everything important in.