As we mentioned earlier this week, George R. R. Martin is not taking your phone calls or your random drop-by visits because he is currently on tour in Australia talking at length about his beloved fantasy series. At one pit stop during his tour, at the Sydney Opera House earlier this week, Martin discussed the enormity of his Song of Fire and Ice series, even expressing some regrets over the ambitious scale of his Westeros universe.
After joking that he should have created only five kingdoms, rather than seven, to save himself some work, he likened his entire writing process to trying to chronicle a world war from every possible side.
I have a large story that I am telling. Essentially it is a world war. It begins very small. Everyone except for Danny is in Winterfell when it first begins, and that is a very tight focus. Then characters split apart into two groups and then the two groups split off into four groups [and each group] has a different story to tell. It’s like if you were trying to do World War II in a novel.
You could write a novel of World War II, but do you just pick one average G.I. or band of brothers? That would just cover the European theater. You need to cover the Pacific theater. Do you make Hitler a P.O.V. character? What about the Japanese? Do you go into the White House? . . . Each of these has a viewpoint and to present something as huge, you either need an omniscient point-of-view structure, like telling the story from God’s point of view, which is a little outdated [or] a mosaic structure like I use.
Aside from possibly making the Westeros universe smaller, Martin also revealed that “if I had to do it over again, I would make Robb a point-of-view character right from the beginning.” Because he did not, Martin thinks readers were able to foretell Robb’s destiny, and if there is one thing Martin hates to do in his books, it is give his readers clues.