Marking time

George R.R. Martin has not put out a book in the Song of Ice and Fire series for six years, so you can imagine the anticipation that proceeded the release of the fifth book (out of seven) in the series, A Dance With Dragons. I'm proud (but not necessarily pleased) to say I just finished this brick, weighing in at 1,022 pages. It was...well, not necessarily disappointing, just a bit of a letdown. Why?

Because GRRM was marking time. People march, or plan, or sail, or brood. Everyone is going somewhere but no one seems to be getting there. Every little detail seems to need to be arranged. I get Martin’s impulse for realism- I raved about it in one of my previous posts- but the truth is, reality is boring. It’s full of bathroom breaks. We don’t need to hear about all the bathroom breaks, and we don’t need to hear about each little nitpicky detail of Jon’s disposition of the food stores and extraneous wildlings, or Dany’s attempts to organize the refugees from Yunkai, or anything like that. These may be fascinating administrative organizational problems for Martin, but for a reader, they are deadly dull.

Another of my issues is Martin’s propensity to begin nearly every chapter—especially the Jon Snow chapters—by recapping what happened to the character previously through the book, sometimes even throughout the series, while the character walks the Wall or visits a refugee camp, and broods. Martin should give his readers more credit—we can probably manage to remember what happened between chapters, and if we can’t it’s not too hard to go back a few pages and figure it out. I probably wouldn’t find this propensity so annoying if it didn’t take up half the chapter on several occasions, and a good five to ten pages on most of the others.

And there’s also a ton of brooding. I’m sorry, Martin’s books are by no means art. The prose is workmanlike and adequate to carry the story along; it’s the plot that I actually care about- when he's writing well, it gallops along at breakneck speed, or sneaks creepily up behind you and then knifes you when you're not looking. When it meanders about uselessly like a blind horse, I am seized with the impulse to rip out great gouts of pages (virtually, as I was reading this on my Kindle), which is what Martin’s editor should have done. But anyway: I don’t really care about Dany and Jon and Davos brooding on what happened in the past. I get that they are troubled by what they’ve seen and done, but a few paragraphs suffice—I don’t need or want whole chapters. Martin should have listened more to the phrase Dany constantly—and uselessly—repeats: If I look back, I am lost. Considering that this book consisted mostly of looking back, Martin is lost ten ways from Sunday.

About four things actually happen in the book: Dany makes a breakthrough with Drogon, her biggest, blackest, meanest dragon. Jon lets a ton of wildlings through the Wall to help him defend it from the Others’ incursion. Tyrion takes up with the exiled lord John Connington, who appears to have been hoarding a dragon prince, Aegon, whose death was feigned during Robert’s Rebellion, and who intends to conquer the Seven Kingdoms. And Stannis, who is still entirely unlikeable, tries to retake Winterfell. If all Martin intended was for these four things to happen, he could have deleted about five hundred pages from his book and made it sleek and swift, maybe not the satisfying chronicle we hoped to get after six years but at least not this rambling monstrosity. Clearly, Martin was engaged in a furious fight with his editor, who must have at last thrown up his or her hands in frustration and stormed off—much to the detriment of the book.

As an author, I know that while the words of the book are my own, it is also on me to create a story that is readable and exciting to a wide audience. I foist my writing on my beta readers and ask them to give me detailed responses on what works and what doesn’t. While I often consider myself a better writer than many of these people (for the most part my beta readers aren't writers; they are scientists, lawyers, and musicians, and brilliant at all of these things, but they don't identify as writers), their input is invaluable for one simple reason: they are objective (at least, far more than I am). Every word in the book was put there by me; every word is my baby, and I am loath to kill my babies. But my readers don’t have those qualms; they can tell me when I’m going on and on and on about nothing, or when something seems stunted and underrealized. I have learned, as an author, when to keep my own counsel and when to listen to my readers and realize that, no matter how much I love something, it’s not necessary or it’s not working.

Now, I’m a young, unpublished author; Martin is the author of over twenty successful books, one of which has been made into an extremely popular and high-rated television series. He has even been hailed as the American Tolkein. I’m sure, given all of the accolades he often gets, that it’s easy to forget one simple fact: he is writing for an audience. He is writing for himself, and well he should be—if writing isn’t in your heart, your bones, your blood, then you have no business in the profession—but he would be nothing without the legions of adoring fans to buy his books, write him star reviews, and make TV series out of his works. There are also wise people trained in the art of being objective and telling authors when to kill their darlings, as is often famously said. These people are called editors, and it is their job to make the work translatable from the author’s pen to the public’s eye. Martin would have been well-advised to listen to all of these people.