I guess The Sixth Sense was the last to pull that off. But that was fifteen years ago.

It did pull it off. Although – see, if you know – I didn’t see The Sixth Sense when it first came out. Not right away. And my wife, Parris, and I kept hearing, "Oh, it has an incredible twist, you’ll never guess what’s coming!" So, three weeks into it, we see it, and five minutes into the movie, we each took out a piece of paper and wrote a note and closed it up. It was: “Bruce Willis is dead.” You know? Then, at the end of the movie, we opened it. We knew a twist was coming, so it was pretty easy to guess the twist. I don’t try to do that kind of twist ending. That’s almost a trick, you know? But I do try to have the stories take unexpected turns, and some of that is character-driven. I try to create these fully fleshed, gray characters that have ambiguities and conflicts within themselves, so they’re not heroes and they’re not villains. One of my favorite characters – and I love Lord of the Rings; don’t make it sound like I’m bashing Tolkien here, ‘cause it’s like my favorite book of all time – but my favorite Tolkien character in Lord of the Rings is Boromir, because he’s the grayest of the characters, and he’s the one who really struggles with the ring and ultimately succumbs to it, but then dies heroically. You see, he has both good and evil in him.

You signal the ambiguity early on when Ned beheads the ranger but he’s in the wrong. It’s not clearcut. And even Jaime Lannister has a friendly rapport with Tyrion after the scene with him pushing Bran out the window. You see another side to him.

Real people are complex. Real people surprise us and they do different things on different days. I own a little theater here in Santa Fe that I bought and reopened a few months ago. We’ve been having some author events. We had Pat Conroy for a signing a few weeks ago. Amazing writer, one of our great American writers. And he’s spent most of his career writing these books about his father. Sometimes cast as memoirs, sometimes cast as fiction, but you can see his troubled relationship with his father peering through, even when he gives him a different name and a different profession and all that. In whatever guise, the Great Santini character, Pat Conroy’s father, is one of the great complex characters of modern literature. He’s a hideous abuser, he terrorizes his kids, he beats up his wife, but he’s also a war hero, a fighter ace, and all that. In some scenes, like the character in The Prince of Tides, he’s almost a Ralph Kramden comic guy, where he buys a tiger and he’s trying to open a gas station and things are going wrong. You read this and it’s all the same guy, and sometimes you feel admiration for him, and sometimes you feel hatred and disgust for him, and, boy, that’s so real. That’s the way sometimes we react to real people in our lives.

Where did you live when you started writing A Song of Ice and Fire?

Here in Santa Fe. I was living in Dubuque, Iowa, in the seventies. I was teaching college. And I’d been writing since I was a kid but I started selling in ’71 and had pretty immediate success in a limited way. I was selling everything I wrote. I did short stories for six years and sold my first novel and got a nice payment for my first novel. In 1977 a friend of mine, a brilliant writer, he was like ten years older than me, his name was Tom Reamy, he had won a John Campbell Award for best new writer in his field. He was a little older, he was in his forties, so he’d started writing older than other people, but he’d been a science fiction fan for a long time. Lived in Kansas City. Tom died of a heart attack just a few months after winning the award for best new writer in his field. He was found slumped over his typewriter, seven pages into a new story. Instant. Boom. Killed him. We weren’t super close. I knew him from conventions and I’d admired his writing. But Tom’s death had a profound effect on me, because I was in my early thirties then. I’d been thinking, as I taught, well, I have all these stories that I want to write, all these novels I want to write, and I have all the time in the world to write them, ‘cause I’m a young guy, and then Tom’s death happened, and I said, Boy. Maybe I don’t have all the time in the world. Maybe I’ll die tomorrow. Maybe I’ll die ten years from now. Am I still teaching? I really liked teaching, actually. I was pretty good at it. I was teaching journalism and English and occasionally they would let me teach a science fiction course at this little college in Iowa, Clark College, a Catholic girls’ college. But teaching used up a lot of emotional energy. I would write a few short stories over Christmas break and more stuff over summer break. But I didn’t have time.