George R.R. Martin has revealed the challenge of choosing which Game of Thrones stories to tell.
The A Song of Ice and Fire writer is the brilliant mind responsible for the original material that inspired one of the most popular and most critically acclaimed shows in television history.
So far, five GoT books have been published and there are two on the way. The next upcoming novel is The Winds of Winter, which is highly anticipated by fans.
In a telling interview with The Guardian, Martin admits that one of the struggles he has with the series is that there are just so many stories to tell. He highlights just a couple of lines in his book and explains that a whole series could emerge from these lines alone.
“There are novels buried in it,” Martin admits. “If I were 30 years younger, I could easily write a series about the Dance of the Dragons” – the Targaryen civil war – “or I could write the story of Aegon’s conquest. Every one of the 13 children of Jaehaerys and Alysanne has a story that could be told about him or her: their rise, their fall, their triumphs, their deaths … It was a lot of fun to create, a lot of fun to live in that world again.”
He also revealed that writing Winds of Winter has been a great challenge and describes it as “a dozen novels” in one.
“I’ve been struggling with it for a few years,” he admits. “The Winds of Winter is not so much a novel as a dozen novels, each with a different protagonist, each having a different cast of supporting players and antagonists and allies and lovers around them, and all of these weaving together in an extremely complex fashion. So it’s very, very challenging.”
