Free George R. R. Martin from The Winds of Winter

At this point in my career, I’ve written many thousands of words and edited quite a few different writers. I know a lot about procrastination. That is why, without speaking to the man or knowing him personally at all, I am nonetheless prepared to make the case that George R. R. Martin simply does not want to finish writing The Winds of Winter.

He’s just not into it. If he continues to force himself to do it, the end result will probably be a pretty terrible book — and I think he knows that, and that’s why he can’t finish it, because he doesn’t want to publish a bad book. The alternative? We don’t get the book at all. And for me, that’s actually preferable.

I could be misreading the signs, of course. Like so many other unhinged fans of A Song of Ice and Fire, I’m basing this purely on vibes, and Martin does love to troll all of us by posting oblique productivity quotes and tagging them with the word “writing,” suggesting that he’s quite merrily chugging along on The Winds of Winter. I also realize that by writing this post, I may be invoking the wrath of fate itself in such a way that Martin will post on his blog tomorrow that The Winds of Winter is officially done and now in his editors’ hands. That would be great, actually! But I don’t think that’s gonna happen.

I realize this is a controversial opinion amongst fellow A Song of Ice and Fire fans. I read the original books all in a whack long before the TV show was even announced, and I waited along with everyone else for A Dance with Dragons, which was a day-one purchase for me. I’m one of those people who has always strongly preferred the books to the HBO series, which was one reason why I actually fell off watching, instead content to wait for the book series to conclude the story instead. Given all of that, you’d think I’d be one of the fans begging GRRM to finish The Winds of Winter already, lest I never get closure on the long-running story. Instead, I feel the complete opposite.

Part of my change in opinion is due to the unusual circumstances in which GRRM finds himself. There are very few other examples of a hit book series getting adapted into a show before it has concluded, but I can think of at least one other: Fullmetal Alchemist, for which the original manga had not concluded even as the anime adaptation sped past it and had to invent its own (widely disliked) ending to the story. The manga’s author, Hiromu Arakawa, was still busily writing the rest of her manga, one that ended up with a much stronger conclusion. A whole different anime called Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood got released a few years later — a redo of the whole adaptation concept, this time more faithfully following Arakawa’s story and, perhaps most importantly, her intended ending.

Like Arakawa, George R. R. Martin had some involvement in the TV adaptation of his work, although he claims not to have been as involved in the show’s final seasons. Speaking to the New York Times in 2022, Martin said “by Season 5 and 6, and certainly 7 and 8, I was pretty much out of the loop.” As for why that happened, “I don’t know — you have to ask [showrunners] Dan [Weiss] and David [Benioff].” At that time, Martin had this to say about The Winds of Winter: “My ending will be very different.”

Yet unlike Arakawa, who kept on writing the Fullmetal Alchemist manga at a steady clip (while simultaneously lending an opinion or two towards the two anime adaptations), George R. R. Martin appears to have had several other priorities. These priorities haven’t all been divergent from the characters from A Song of Ice and Fire, of course; Martin’s 2018 novel Fire & Blood, which is set 300 years before the events of A Song of Ice and Fire, led to the TV show House of the Dragon, which Martin has also been working on and has seemed pretty excited about, if his personal blog is any indication. He’s clearly not tired of the world he built and he still has more to say.

It just doesn’t seem like The Winds of Winter fits into the category of things that Martin is excited about.

This is super weird to me, because if I were Martin, the shitshow that was Game of Thrones’ final season and the disappointed fan reactions would be enough to psychologically propel me into angrily and speedily writing a “very different” ending, like the one Martin apparently has in mind. Spite can be a powerful motivator, and if Martin is correct that he got slow-faded out of that Game of Thrones production room, wouldn’t he be even more motivated to correct the record? And yet, here we are, in a world where years and years go by and Martin seems far more interested in telling totally different stories.

This is the part of the article where we’re going to talk about procrastination and why it happens. In my experience, there are two major reasons why it can occur. Again, I’m only talking about myself here; mine is the writer’s brain I know the best, after all. Ever since I got an ADHD diagnosis at the age of 12, I have become extremely familiar with the two kinds of procrastinating that I do.

The first is the better kind, because I personally have found I can solve it with a Wellbutrin prescription. The way it works is simple: It’s just too damn hard to get started on a given task, especially a hard one. Even people without ADHD can understand this experience, but people who have ADHD may experience it in a far more acute way, to an extent that their brain may feel that it is impossible to get started at all. I’ve seen it called “ADHD paralysis.” Whatever you call it, it’s a huge pain in the ass if you want to get some writing done, especially difficult or complicated writing. Imagine this: You have writing you want to do, you have a deadline (maybe one you’ve already blown), you know exactly what you want to write, and you do want to write — you just cannot get yourself to start. Here’s the important part of that sentence: You want to write. The only thing holding you back is your own brain.

Again, I don’t know Martin personally, but based on his updates, I don’t think that’s his problem with The Winds of Winter. I think the problem is that he doesn’t actually want to write it — or even worse, he has no idea how to write it, due to the various plot entanglements the characters in the book now face. This would result in an entirely different kind of procrastination.

This happens to me, too. It also happens to other writers I know, including ones I’ve edited. Sometimes you have an idea and you’re really excited about it, and the pitch gets accepted. But then when you actually start writing, you realize that the idea doesn’t work. Or maybe it just doesn’t excite you anymore. Even though you’ve already started, you just can’t seem to continue, or finish, your original idea. Remember the other type of procrastination, where getting started was the hard part, and once you started, you were off to the races, writing and excited about what you had to say? This isn’t that. This is the opposite, where you’ve started but you’re realizing that you have absolutely no fucking clue what you even want to say, or even if you have anything to say at all. This is around when you go to your editor and you say, “This isn’t working.” Or maybe your editor comes to you and asks why your draft is so late, and you admit defeat. At that point, you can work together to turn the idea into something else. That doesn’t always work, though. Sometimes the only solution is to walk away from the idea entirely.

No one is sadder than I am about this situation. I want to read The Winds of Winter, too. I’ve wanted to read it for a very long time. But you know what makes me even more sad? The past decade of listening to the ways that George R. R. Martin talks about The Winds of Winter on his personal blog, in interviews, and at press events. There is no joy in this man’s eyes. During a live event in October 2023 with fellow author Cassandra Clare, who said her next book is due out in 2025, Martin said in a visibly defeated and frustrated tone, “Really depressing thing is, that still may beat The Winds of Winter. Who knows? […] I’m 12 years late with The Winds of Winter, as we know. I’m just gonna put it right out there. You guys don’t have to pester me about it.”

And yet, people have been pestering him, and they show no sign of stopping. It keeps on feeling like the book is almost ready. Two years ago, Martin told the public the book was “75% done.” But perhaps rather than talking about his recent estimated percentages, it would be easier to link to this extensive Esquire article outlining every single time that Martin has attempted to put a timeline on the book’s completion, ever since he started writing it circa 2010. There have been a lot of bad guesses on this man’s part about how soon he’s going to be able to finish this book. It’s giving Zeno’s Paradox.

Here’s what I can’t stop thinking about: The Winds of Winter is not even the last book in the series. So it’s not like fans are just impatiently waiting for the conclusion. This is actually the penultimate book. So let’s just say George does manage to knock this one out (which I don’t think he will, based on how much difficulty he’s had thus far). Do fans really think that A Dream of Spring is going to come easily to this man, based on how he’s been doing so far with The Winds of Winter?

Just look at the publish dates for every A Song of Ice and Fire book up to now. Starting with A Game of Thrones in 1996, A Clash of Kings in 1998, and A Storm of Swords in 2000, each book was two years apart (impressive!). Then there’s A Feast for Crows in 2005, and A Dance with Dragons in 2011 — five years in between, then six. Now we’re up to a staggering 13-year wait, and counting.

Meanwhile, Martin doesn’t seem to have a problem getting other projects done — like, say, contributing to Elden Ring’s lore — nor any problem with agreeing to do other projects. This only annoys the fans who want him to have a one-track mind for The Winds of Winter. But to those fans I can only say, put yourself in his shoes. You’re a creative person; you want to do projects that excite you. What does it say that he keeps on choosing other things to do? What does it say about The Winds of Winter that it’s always last on the to-do list? In my case, that would be a pretty strong indication that I simply didn’t have any interest in doing the task that I just kept on pushing off, year after year after year after year. And it might even indicate that I was not-so-secretly hoping that particular task would disappear entirely.

George R. R. Martin’s editors are probably not ever going to do this for him. After all, for them, it’s a huge financial boon if he manages to finish the book. Even if it sucks ass, it will sell! The very prospect of ending his contract would be absurd on their end. And yet, having seen so many years go by with no final draft, it very much appears to be torture for him. I can’t condone that. And I’m a little worried about what kind of book could even result from such a death march.

As fans, or just as humans, we need to accept this reality. Stop asking this man to write the book he clearly hates. After all, we did get an ending, in the form of a rushed television finale; several of the plot points in that finale did line up with where a lot of the books’ foreshadowing appeared to be heading. It’s not like we have no closure at all. It’s very sloppy closure, but it’s something. It’s probably about as good as the original Fullmetal Alchemist ending.

I don’t really know what it looks like for us as laypeople to free George R. R. Martin from this situation. Without his publisher actually forgiving him, he probably won’t ever experience the true relief that comes from an editor telling you that you don’t have to keep working on something that you despise and can’t seem to finish or make into a draft that’s any good. It’s sort of like the relief that happens when you get plans canceled that you never wanted to do in the first place, but way better. Since this will probably never happen for Martin, I can only hope that with this essay, I manage to convince just a few other people to stop pestering the man to finish a book that he seems to have no interest in completing. Imagine how bad he must already feel. He doesn’t need any more reminders of the fact that this series ended with a whimper instead of a bang.

At least Elden Ring was a really cool game, start to finish. We’ll always have that. And probably a hell of a lot of other really cool projects from George R. R. Martin that he actually wants to work on. The Winds of Winter just isn’t going to be one of them.