This is basically what I've said. George has been working on this story since 1991 and he just turned 76 this week. If Winds gets finished, he should be able to find that renewed motivation for Dream when the finish line is in sight. That is, if he cares enough about cementing his legacy.
He does, it's just that the books are incredibly complicated and he has a high standard of quality for his writing, so it takes him a lot of writing and rewriting to achieve what he wants to achieve
@@kangarooMonkee typo you say 🤔 might be worth seeing how much that dusty old copy is worth in that case. Shame it aint a typo on the cover but the publisher page is the next best thing
Same. I can’t even watch videos about “how close to done is winds of winter” that are more than 5 years old. Or winds predictions videos from 7-8 years ago
Good video. I agree that a dream of spring will be easier to write than winds, but another factor in this puzzle is that Martin intends to write a dunk novel and Blood and fire before a dream.
The good thing is, those are easy projects for George to write, he's said before that he doesn't have to think too hard about the context of those stories, especially Fire & Blood since that is mostly annotations from previous works
I don't think people are filled with hopelessness or dread when thinking about Dream. The community has pretty much accepted the reality we will never get this book, it is what it is. The dread is whether or not Winds at least will come out or not. And yeah, Dreams won't be as hard to write, this is typical of all stories. Usually it's the beginning and the end that are the easiest to write, just filling the middle is what's tough, and the transitions between the middle and the beginning/end is what's hard.
The thing is that George works very slowly. Not because he doesn't know what to write but a mixture of work ethic and interest. He will never get to dream of spring since he will take a loooong hiatus after winds.
My cope is that in order to write winds of winter he actually does have to plan out a lot of a dream of spring. To the point where in order to write the penultimate book, he has to mostly plan out the final book.
Good video. But in my opinion, there is no way GRRM wraps up this story in 2 books. The pacing of the plot has drastically slowed down since ASOS and I doubt that changes in winds. Just look at the pacing for the winds sample chapters
He might want to rewrite a lot for the final book though. I would imagine he'd want to get every ending and every major death or surprise exactly right and by the right viewpoing character, plus we know he has a hard time deciding from who's perspective he would write chapters when some of them meet (like with the Meereeneese knot) so the final two books will be difficult in that sense: a lot of rewriting, trial and error; which is what has kept him stuck with Winds all this time.
He said that his mayor regret regarding ASOIAF is not being wealthy enough to wait until he had every book written to publish them, now he is wealthy enough, I think he will not publish TWOW until he is finishing with ADOS, thats the only thing that make sense, so I think he will take an extra 5 or 10 years but the time between TWOW and ADOS will be a lot shorter
Yeah basically. Since he doesnt want others finishing his story but feels an ending must be there, I think he does have a short story in his will about how things get to a certain point and then end to at least make an end to it
A Winds of Winter would have also be easy to write if GRRM did not try to put every idea that enter his head. It is not that he did not have ideas on how it would end- his desire to make it the goat grimdark fastasy novel outweight his desire to end it.
the most optimistic take on the lengthy time he’s taken for releasing winds is that he’s doing writings for both (which he’s not). Then he’s probably been battling another meeranes knot/5 year gap in winds. The only hope is that the way HotD has been treated will give him some tremendous motivation to finish his book. Edit. GRRM has talked about how he struggles to write beats he already knows than completely new territory.
GRRM the day he finishes Winds of Winter “whew, well now that that’s done, I’m going to take a nice long break from writing anything for a year at least”…. Flash forward 5 years later “I admit I haven’t got much writing done on Dream. I have about 1/4 of the book done, all of those chapters being leftovers from Winds of Winter 🤓”….. paaaaain
Imagine him pulling a kanye if he actually finishes winds/dream but its only published as ebook so he can always change the important parts whenever he wants if he changes his mind, but that would still be way better than nothing
He is not writing like a machine, you can’t predict 5% per year. George is stuck on something since 2015, once he figures it out it would be a year till the book is out, but it doesn’t look good. He probably sits down to think about it, then gets mad at everything and proceeds to take a break for a month. It’s also possible he just rewrote the book in 2016 and is stuck on this thing since 2018 but still, writing yourself into a corner is pain in the ass.
While i fully agree that Winds must be extremely hard to writte with way to many moving parts and with the sentiment that some parts of Spring are likely written on his MS Dos PC and the final parts are surely done in his mind i do not think that GRRM has the strength in him to release Twow and directly hopping into Springs just to go full throttle, pedel to the metall high octane on it. GRRM has lost many friend and collegues in the last years which surely made him think about himself and realisticly he must know himself that he barely has the strength in him to finish Winds. I suspect he might have already a secret co-writter going who with GRRM inputs, partial works etc. is already writting a halfcooked version of springs. Then once Winds is finished, GRRM will start a writter by numbers type half editorial, half writter to add onto the baseline that has been written according to his instructions beforehand so he can on one hand finish his magnum opus as well es enjoy happy times with his loved ones instead of suffering / working hard on a doomed project. Its an out there theory but with him enjoying editing and his successfull adventures into co-writing projects such as blood and fire and elden ring + his cryptic ass block post about dreamers and him having these sus visits to his publisher something is brewing underneath the surface and sadly it doesnt seem to be winds this year. Additionally I cannot believe that GRRM still has to write more then maybe 5 to 10% of Winds for as its mentioned he must have the "Dream of Springs" effect going that the puzzle increasingly taking on the right shape and he has to fit in only the last pieces albeight those might be hard ones to fit. Additionally he must be getting a large morale boost towards the finish line as basicly everyone gets when any larger writting project is nearing its completion.
(Spoilers for Breaking Bad) Imagine that S5 E15 was the latest released episode and you have to write the last one. How easy would that be, for you or any writer, even if it's an almost complete puzzle? How long would it take to come up with something close to the masterpiece Felina? Badger and Pete threatening Gretchen & Elliot to launder the money. The whole "I did it for me scene" Jesse killing Todd after the machine gun obliterates the Nazis crew. Jack being shot mid sentence like Hank. Walt dying by his own hands while saving Jesse & The Baby Blue song. Would it have been EASY to write that while starting from a bar in a snowy town, surrounded by police? George knows the ending, or maybe he knew the original ending of the trilogy and that doesn't really fit the story anymore. Even then, there are still hundreds of little details, answers and payoffs that must be written. And I don't think he can do it. Like he said, he is a gardener, not an architect that has everything planned, and his garden grows larger with each book. Now it's more of a jungle that requires a young, tireless man with a machete to cut through all that and bring the story to a grand conclusion. Even releasing Winds will be a small miracle and I think that writing a satisfying finale is an even harder task for him at this point. (As a great man says: I'm probably wrong about half of this)
It's going to take more than 2 books to finish the story. I'm thinking 4. We MAY get 1 100% written by GRRM. After that the next will be around half george, then less than a third. The final will likely just be a raw outline of how the story ends from grrm. Maybe some quotes from George. The gaps will be from ghost writers.
I think… probably pretty controversially… that George plans on releasing winds and then dying with maybe a little bit of spring done and having that be the legacy. He won’t disappoint anyone with a bad ending, it will be the fault of whoever picks it up or just his final unfinished work before he tragically died. Either way he isn’t risking his legacy with fucking up the ending.
I hope you're right, but unfortunately if asoiaf is considered as Goerge's project, then i know starting a project is always easier than finishing it. infarct, finishing is always the hardest part.
I just wish he could get whatever it is he needed to finish. Be it help from someone else, like someone to map out the story, help him cut/edit things that don’t need to be in the winds or dream, get real focused on moving the story ahead, someone to help him write, and he can go back and edit/change/rewrite to give it his flair, whatever. Thats the only way I see it getting finished (mainly dream. I think he can finish winds eventually on his own). Is he to stubborn to accept help? Is he overburdened by other projects? Well sorry but those other projects aren’t going to cement his legacy as an all time great. Only ASOIAF will. Screw the shows. I know he’s had a rough few years as well personally. I hope he can heal from that and find some hope and peace. I love the man and his work. It’s just a bummer that it’s not finished already. I get it, but at the same time it’s just like Jeeze, we may never get the books.
The story has only ever expanded and George can't figure out how to untangle it. So much still has to happen, Danny isn't close to even getting close to westeros. I don't think he can finish the story in 2 books. Also George isn't the peak of fitness. We may get winds but I seriously doubt we get dream sadly
Whats rough is due to the show he prolly got plot locked writing these two. Imagine your almost done with your magus opus just to have the wind pulled out from under you because perhaps the show ran parallel with the books plot direction and flopped so back to the drawing board and hes been stuck ever since.
The thing is the show didn't go to the same direction. They changed direction as soon as season 5 although there were two books to adapt. He definitely must be under a lot of pressure, but he said the show's perception will not change his own writing direction. Bran is very likely gonna be King for example. There is much symbolism, parallels and foreshadowing in the books, but none in the show. His story is already more engaging since book 1, i can’t imagine this ending happening in an unsatisfying way. George knows what kind of story he is writing and has consistency in his themes. The showrunners simply didn't understand it(they claimed "Themes are for 8th grade book reports"). They only liked his surprising plot points, like the Red Wedding, but didn't understand his stylistic devices. So when they were starting to do stuff on their own it of course started dropping in quality. Edit: corrected typos.
There's no reason to think he's affected by fan response of the show's ending. The show was its own thing, ignored so much material they could have used, and while he provided some things that will play out the same in the books, HOW we get to those plots will be completely different. Plus, he's made it clear that when writing a story in progress, if the fans predict something, you can't just change it for the sake of subverting their correct prediction. The story wouldn't make sense. Just because the fans don't like his planned ending, doesn't mean he can change it at this point. All the groundwork has already been planned and built, he has to stick to it. What's more likely is that he's juggling WAY too many plots that need to cohesively come together and make sense. Not only that, he's juggling a bunch of other work, like Blood and Fire, as well as his commitments to the HBO shows. He also probably has a personal life, and he's getting old af. He's tired, not as passionate as he once was, is wealthier than he could imagine with a limited amount of time left on this planet. All this adds up to a lack of motivation to finish this story that's already finished in his head.
Well done! Thanks for giving us hope. Btw I am convinced Dany is not dying and I can on and on about reasons why if you are interested. I have a lot of long Q&A’s on this topic on the Quora Space I run, A Theory of Ice & Fire. -Jeff H’ghar
This is basically cope, lol. George can't finish it in 2 books unless somehow The Winds of Winter wraps up the White Walker war. He’s always writing expansionist content, not writing in a way that leads to a conclusion.
The only issue is winds of winter being split into two , one book with climaxes and plot progression and with the ending be a 5 year time skip and the next book being the winds of winter events and long night plus expansion of the lore that grrm wanted before dream wrapping everything up
why so people keep bringing up winds and spring...a dance with dragons was obviously the conclusion of the story...a disappointing end but clearly an ending
