



Prime Time Replay:

George R. R. Martin

on A Game of Thrones





Film, on the other hand, I have come to hate. The writer is king in TV; in film, the writer is shit. I spent three or four years of my life doing screenplays, several of them with Melinda, and don't have a foot of film to show for it. In fact, no one ever =saw= the screenplays except a few development execs. I love going to movies, but if I am lucky I will never have to "develop" one again.

In an odd way, I think I could never have written A GAME OF THRONES unless I had done WILD CARDS first, by the way. The large cast of characters in GOT is very unlike my earlier novels, which focuses very tightly on a single protagonist (DYING OF THE LIGHT, WINDHAVEN, ARMAGEDDON RAG), or at most two (FEVRE DREAM). WILD CARDS, on the other hand, positively =teemed= with characters, and editing those books, especially the mosaic novels, gave me a lot of practice in juggling mutliple points of view. Structurally, A GAME OF THRONES is a WILD CARDS mosaic novel, only with me writing all the parts.

Maybe a final question or two as the time dwindles. Where do you see yourself as a writer in ten or twenty years, George? Still doing the same admittedly wide range of fiction? Or are there new frontiers you want to tackle?

Ed, to tell the truth, I'm not certain what I'm going to be writing five years from now, let alone twenty. Books, TV, short fiction ... I'd like to do it all, but there's never enough time. Especially since I have the vague desire to try and have a life too. I have not really done all that well at that last part; sometimes I look back gloomily over all the years spent sitting in front of one keyboard or another, writing about passion and adventure and wonders, when what I really want is to =live= some of that. But maybe that's the curse of all writers. Most biographies of writers are deadly dull, except to other writers -- pages and pages of, "And then he wrote." Ah, well.