Anonymous wrote:There is a writer's block, and there is George RR Martin's writer block.
George’s problems are as follows:
1) he and his big name fans who run his website have said that he doesn’t use outlines, notes, etc. as much as other fantasy writers. He kind of goes by vibes. This makes it hard for someone else to step in and “help,” or even take over the whole thing. Brandon Sanderson was able to finish The Wheel of Time books well after Robert Jordan’s death because Jordan gave him really good notes and plans. Also I personally think their writing styles are similar which helps.
2) the ending of the TV series is approximately what George had planned for the books (obviously there would be some differences), but people didn’t like it so now he feels he has to go back and edit and change stuff he may have already written.
3) We all know the differences between the books and the show got much larger over time, even discounting the fact that the show outpaced the books by a lot. There were characters, fairly major ones at that, in the books who never appeared in the show. Now everyone knows that since the show ending was approximately what George wanted for the book ending, those characters are essentially unimportant red herrings, not critical to the end game, and thus he’s further lost motivation to continue the books since a bunch of the characters have been revealed to be unimportant.
4) he keeps getting pulled into side projects which he seems to like better at this point. George made most of his money as a screen writer/script writer before hitting it big with his novels (he did publish some before the first ASoIaF book but it wasn’t really lucrative). It seems like he can never turn down “write an episode of a show!” Or “write a bunch of short stories!” And it’s obviously much easier to go that route than to crank out a 1000 page book that has to be internally consistent with his other 1000 page books that every nerd on planet Earth has already read multiple times.