The topic of George RR Martin (GRRM) and his ever-behind schedule Song of Ice and Fire is one that brings surprising passion from both fan and professional alike in the SF publishing world. It’s a topic I’ve discussed with friends and coworkers, people I meet at conventions and industry gatherings, my agent and editor, and everyone in between. Like abortion or Britney Spears, it seems everyone’s got an opinion, and theirs is the only right one.
For those who are unfamiliar, the short version of the argument is this. A Song of Ice and Fire is one of the most popular and talked about fantasy series since The Lord of the Rings, and I don’t know anyone that has taken the time to read it that hasn’t been totally floored by how amazing and intricate it is. I’ve recommended it to (and bought the first book as a gift for) dozens of people myself.
However, each successive book has seemingly taken longer to come out than the last, and despite the promises of Amazon.com, the publisher, and Mr. Martin himself, the books stubbornly refuse to come out on time. Because of this, a faction of the fans of the series (including a great many industry professionals) have grown… surly. They bombard the author, the publisher, and the internet with complaints that often forego basic civility, and make assumptions about the author’s character and how he spends his time that are unfair at best for anyone not actively hiding behind the curtains and watching the man go about his life.
Now, to be fair, some of these complaints are legitimate. Others, less so. These issues have been spelled out in great detail in some excellent articles written this week, and I have no desire to revisit them. If you are interested in the history and specifics, I point you to Shawn Speakman’s In Defense of George article on Suvudu andAdam Whitehead’s two part “Defence of Dragons” posting on his blog the Wertzone. Part 1 and Part 2. You can also check out Aidan Moher’s comments about the topic on his blog, A Dribble of Ink.
What I would like to discuss instead is my personal experience with writing, and how I feel it relates to the situation, and perhaps gives me a different perspective than many people. Please understand that it’s not my intention to put myself, a relatively unknown author, on equal level with GRRM or any of the other authors referenced below, all of whom have far more experience than I do, and have earned their success. I’m just trying to put myself in GRRM’s shoes by exploring my own situation.
I started writing The Painted Man (AKA The Warded Man) sometime in 1999. I wasn’t fully dedicated to it, as I was also working full time and writing other books, but it was a project that I began plugging away at when I had time, and a couple of years later I put aside my other projects and started focusing hard on it. After several drafts (wherein I threw out a good 60% of the original story), I finished the sale manuscript at the end of 2006, approximately seven years after starting it.
Admittedly, that new 60% of the final manuscript was pretty much written entirely in 2006, while I was working full time, but I was writing with a very heightened focus at the time, because I’d had many long years to turn over pieces of the puzzle and put together the border. By the time I started filling it in, I knew exactly what I was doing and was moving decisively.
When I sold the book in 2007, the publisher bought two sequels as well, and asked me how long I expected it to take for me to write them. I had just given notice at my job to shift to writing full time, and told them that I was already well into writing The Desert Spear (true), and that it would take about 9 months to finish it, meaning I would have it done in May/June of 2008. The third book, I said, should be ready about a year after that.
That was a very naïve thing to say, but I had been a professional writer for all of 5 minutes, and was very naïve. Now here we are in January 2009, and I still have two chapters left to write, not to mention several rounds of expected rewrites, all of which I believe are absolutely necessary to get the book up to my own standards, much less anyone else’s.
But I didn’t just pull that 9 month estimate out of my ass. Instead, I arrived at it by a faulty equation.
While I was writing in my spare time, I had a quota of about 1,000 words a day, or 7,000 a week. Sometimes I wrote less, sometimes more, but that was always my goal, and when I look at my word count spreadsheet (yes, I am that anal), I kept to it on average.
So when I considered how long it would take to write the next book, I said to myself, “Well, if I can write 1,000 words a day in my spare time, surely I can write three times as much in a full work day when I am doing nothing else.” I decided to be a little conservative and call it 2,500 words a day. Still, I thought, that’s over 900,000 words a year. Since The Painted Man was around 160,000 words, I figured nine months gave me PLENTY of room to write, even if I threw out some crap chapters (inevitable) and spent a lot of time editing (which I do).
But, as any professional writer can tell you, it doesn’t work that way.
First off, “writing full time” doesn’t mean you can spend your whole day actually writing. There are contracts to read and sign, ongoing negotiations for international sales, itemized taxes, international tax paperwork, promotion, marketing, website building and maintenance, editor consultation, agent consultation, interviews, appearances, networking, conventions, blogging, and a million other aspects of a writing career less publicized but every bit as important as the actual writing if you want to pay your bills and support your family. I was also completely unprepared for how much having a child would eat into my writing time since I work from home and my baby is fricken’ adorable.
But all that aside, even if I had a PA to handle all the above grunt work and no baby, there is still no way in hell I would be averaging 2,500 words a day, unless half of those words were utter crap, or on an unrelated subject. Even being the meticulous outliner I am, I constantly revise my story, changing direction as new ideas come to me, or my characters refuse to do what my outline demands, telling me it is not in their nature. Also, while I never wrote during my day job, it was a job that never challenged me much mentally, and thus left me plenty of mental RAM to work out plot problems, mentally craft bits of prose, and ponder overall story structure. The need to do spend hours each day pondering the story without actually writing anything down didn’t go away when I started writing full time. Without the roadmap that consideration gives, I find my writing can take me off on tangents that, while interesting, do not advance the story as a whole.
So when I said I could finish The Desert Spear in 9 months it was a guess, but one I thought at the time was educated, though in retrospect it was not.
My bad.
Part of me feels really guilty over the fact that The Desert Spear is off schedule, though I have been very transparent to my publishers about why, and they have been very understanding (mainly because they knew I was talking out my ass and scheduled the actual publication accordingly. Once bitten, twice shy, I guess). I still feel like a bad person for making promises I couldn’t keep, and berate myself daily for it.
But what can I do? Especially since The Painted Man has had such success, I feel I owe it to the publishers, my readers, and most of all myself to deliver the best book I can, even if it takes longer than I expected.
I had 7 years to write the Painted Man. It looks like I will write The Desert Spear in about 2.5, including editing. Coming up is The Daylight War. I know in broad strokes what I want to happen in that book, but I haven’t even outlined it yet. I can guess at how long it will take, and it won’t be quite as naïve a guess as the last time, but it will still be just that.
There are many writers who work much faster. My JABberwocky nemesis, Brandon Sanderson, writes like the wind (Damn you, Sandersoooonnnn!), as do authors like Naomi Novik and RA Salvatore. Piers Anthony and Stephen King churn out a book every five minutes. But every writer has their own process, and if you as a reader enjoy their work, then I think it’s part of the reader/writer contract to give them that.
So I’m glad to see people coming out in defense of GRRM. I really hate the casual way people seem to disparage him, as if it’s become generally acceptable, like disparaging George Bush. I’m seeing it a lot with Patrick Rothfuss, too, where he can’t seem to write anything on his blog without people giving him shit about his next book being late. People even talked about JK Rowling in less than respectful terms when she didn’t deliver on time. I realize that some fans see this sort of behavior as a compliment, showing that they love the work and are passionately awaiting its continuance, and it is in a way, but there are certain nuances of tone that are lost in text, and certain manners of giving people shit that are best left to friends and loved ones rather than strangers. If those authors are anything like me, I expect they are feeling tremendous pressure to produce something exceptional, and I think they are both doing their best to write a book that lives up to their own standard first and foremost, so that they do not disappoint their readers as so many authors do, slumping after a strong start.
I have nightmares about that.
Discarded blog entry titles:
A Clash of Fans
A Song of Deadlines and Flames
A Game of Deadlines
A Defense of Dragons
A Feast of Flamewars
Posted on February 2, 2009 at 3:13 am by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Musings, Writing
19 Comments »
The February 2009 issue of Locus Magazine is out, which contains their 2008 Year in Review and Recommended Reading List.