George R.R. Martin’s One Writing Habit Could Derail The Winds of Winter
George R.R. Martin says the same creative struggle that once slowed A Song of Ice and Fire is still dogging his push to finish The Winds of Winter, as he opens up in a new interview.
George R.R. Martin built one of the biggest fictional sandboxes on Earth, then had to figure out how to clean it up. The man is still deep in The Winds of Winter, and the same issue that slowed him down years ago is still the monster in the room: too many moving parts, all moving at once.
The headache that never went away
Back in 2013, Martin told New Jersey Monthly that the toughest part of A Song of Ice and Fire wasn’t dragons or battles — it was keeping the storytelling math from melting his brain.
"A constant challenge is how do you keep all these plots straight? I feel like I’m juggling a bunch of balls, and sometimes it’s hard to keep all the balls separate from each other. The sheer size of the series is daunting."
Fans have been waiting more than a decade for The Winds of Winter, and that quote pretty much explains why. When your book has the scope of a small nation, every chapter touches five others.
The POV choice he wishes he could undo
Martin chose the rotating-POV approach from the start because it lets you live inside major characters’ heads. It works — we get the politics, the secrets, the grudges — but it also multiplies the complexity. Case in point: he now regrets giving Arys Oakheart his own viewpoint chapter in A Feast for Crows. Arys only appears once as a narrator, and Martin has said he could have folded that material into Arianne Martell’s perspective instead. It’s a small, nerdy detail, but it’s a revealing one: even a single extra POV can ripple across the structure.
What that means for Winds
Martin has said he isn’t adding new viewpoint characters in The Winds of Winter. Good. But at the Toronto International Film Festival, he also admitted that plenty of new faces have still muscled their way into the narrative — characters that have popped up and budded into the story. Translation: fewer new POVs, but not necessarily fewer names to track. The 77-year-old writer is still wrangling an ecosystem, not a straight line.
The way through: less sprawl, more spine
Martin has acknowledged the current book can feel like a dozen different novels running at once. That’s the byproduct of earlier creative choices, not laziness. If this saga had a simple highway to the finish, we’d already be there. Compare that to Fire & Blood, which he called easier to write because it moves in a clear, linear way.
If Winds has a cheat code, it’s probably this: narrow the focus to the core characters and their main arcs, prune the detours, and let the secondary stories orbit instead of compete. Easier said than done, sure — but that’s how you trade the juggling act for a march.
Where the books stand
- A Game of Thrones (1996)
- A Clash of Kings (1998)
- A Storm of Swords (2000)
- A Feast for Crows (2005)
- A Dance with Dragons (2011)
- The Winds of Winter (TBA)
- A Dream of Spring (TBA)
How should Martin thread this needle? Cut POVs? Trim subplots? Go long and let it sprawl? Drop your fix below — bonus points if it doesn’t require time travel.