New Yorker: George R.R. Martin
The new HBO series “Game of Thrones” debuts tonight. As some background, here are excerpts from a lengthy New Yorker feature on the book series’ author George R.R. Martin:
The writer George R. R. Martin left Hollywood in 1994, determined to do what he wanted for a change. He’d had some success in television, working on a new version of “The Twilight Zone” and on the fantasy series “Beauty and the Beast.” But the pilot for “Doorways,” a series he’d developed, hadn’t been picked up, and he was tired of the medium’s limitations. “Everything I did was too big and too expensive in the first draft,” he told me recently. He wanted castles and vistas and armies, and producers always made him cut that stuff. A line producer for “The Twilight Zone” once explained to him, “You can have horses or you can have Stonehenge. But you can’t have horses and Stonehenge.”
On the printed page, however, he could have it all. He recalls telling himself, “I’m going to write a fantasy and it’s going to be huge. I’m going to have all the characters I want and all the battles I want.” In 1996, he published a novel of seven hundred pages, “A Game of Thrones,” the first volume of a projected trilogy called “A Song of Ice and Fire.” The series chronicles the struggle for power among several aristocratic families in the Seven Kingdoms, an imaginary medieval nation. In a genre crowded with stale variations on what Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey,” with plots distilled from ancient legends, Martin took his inspiration from history instead of from mythology; he based his tale, loosely, on the Wars of the Roses, the bloody dynastic struggles in medieval England. Compared with most epic fantasy fiction, Martin’s story contained relatively little magic, and it felt dangerous, lusty, and real.
— —
Martin has now sold more than fifteen million books worldwide, and his readership will likely multiply exponentially after the launch, this month, of “Game of Thrones,” a lavish HBO series based on “A Song of Ice and Fire.” He is committed to nurturing his audience, no matter how vast it gets. “It behooves a writer to be good to his fans,” he says. He writes a lively blog, and though he has an assistant, Ty Franck, who screens the multitude of comments that are posted on it, he tries to read many of them himself. A fan in Sweden, Elio M. García, Jr., maintains an official presence for Martin on Facebook and Twitter, and also runs the main “Ice and Fire” Web forum, Westeros.org. (Westeros is the name of the fictional continent that is home to the Seven Kingdoms.) When Martin is travelling, which is often, he attends the gatherings of the Brotherhood Without Banners, an unofficial fan club with informal chapters around the world, and he counts its founders and other longtime members among his good friends. In many respects, he’s a model for contemporary authors confronted with a wobbly publishing industry and a fractured marketplace. Anne Groell, Martin’s editor at Random House, tells her authors, “Outreach and building community with readers is the single most important thing you can do for your book these days. You need to make them feel invested in your career.”
I’ll be watching the series debut tonight. How about you?
For more of the New Yorker feature on Martin, go here.