George R.R. Martin | A Dance with Dragons

0:25George R.R. Martin is an author and a television producer and writer. He is most famous for his series A Song of Ice and Fire, which was then adapted by HBO into the overwhelmingly popular television drama Game of Thrones. In 2017, Time magazine dubbed him an American Tolkien. He joins Google for a Q &A session and to share more about his novel A Dance with Dragons. Originally published in August of 2011, here is George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons.

0:58Ladies and gentlemen, the man who has given us one of the best fantasy series of all time, one of the most compelling reasons to watch television today, and the man who made it acceptable for nerds to talk about fantasy in public again. Please join me in welcoming George R. R. Martin. Thank you all. It's a thrill to be here. This is quite a kick for me. I'm on my book tour now for Dance with Dragons and visiting a city a day. It's sort of a blur where I am right now, but I've done many events. This is the first time I've done one like this. However, where most of the audience seems to have computers in their laps, that's sort of intimidating.

1:40But interesting, very interesting. So it's, you know, I came out of the world of science fiction. I wrote a lot of science fiction early in my career. And I've always gone back and forth with other science fiction writers about whether fantasy and science fiction are, in fact, two different flavors of the same thing, which is my contention, or whether they're absolute polar opposites. And fantasy is corrupting the precious bodily fluids of science fiction, which is the contention of others. And I think the fact that I'm here at this campus devoted to the world of computers and the cutting edge of tomorrow and you're all fantasy geeks is proof that I'm right.

2:23And it's all one big thing. Thank you for coming, George. We really appreciate it. And a token of our appreciation on behalf of the whole project team presented by the person who designed these fine T-shirts that we're wearing. Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. And we do expect you to wear it on your next television appearance. Oh, OK. So, for everyone in attendance and the folks on the stream, we have taken the most popular questions from the YouTube page, the moderated page, and from internal Googlers, and we'll be going through those questions today. One of the guiding principles we have, since a lot of the folks here are going to be new to the series and know it either from television or from just reading the first book, is we're not going to ask any questions that touch on content matter beyond a Game of Thrones.

3:08So even if your question got bumped up, unfortunately, we may not be asking it today. So with that, we have a question from Jigger444. You mentioned you had trouble cutting down some of the Aria chapters for A Dance with Dragons. Would you ever post the unused material on your website? No, probably not. I do save everything. When I cut material, I do save it because I may find a place for it later. and there are things that I cut out of the second book that I find a place for in the fourth book and that sort of thing is constantly going on. But I'm still carrying forward material that I cut from the first book.

3:48Some of it as short as a single pithy sentence that I particularly liked but no longer fit and others half chapters that I took out. and maybe I'll find a place for that but I have a feeling that much of that and more will still be in my files when the whole series is done but I don't know I ever wanted getting out there it's you know taken out for a reason there's one chapter from from the new book from Dance with Dragons that this does go beyond Game of Thrones, but I'll be vague. There's this Tyrion chapter that drove me crazy all through the decade, it seemed, that I worked on on Deaths with Dragons and this precursor Feast for Crows, where I kept putting it in and then taking it out and then putting it in and then taking it out and then I put it in as a dream sequence and then I took it out and then I made it a series of recurring dreams, each one going slightly further, so I put it in seven chapters and then I I took it out of those seven chapters.

5:04It's one of those chapters that I think is, by itself, is a terrific chapter. I like the way it came together. It's vivid. It's kind of spooky. It's got some really great visual imagery in it, and it leads me absolutely down a dead end, where if I take that path, I'm kind of stuck on a detour, and so I had to take it out. But that chapter I may, I don't know, publish at some point down the road, but not most of the other material. Great. So the next one is a multi-part question, and it came up a lot on the public site, and there are also some Googler questions around it as well. Have you ever, and this comes from somebody whose name I can't pronounce in Vancouver.

5:48Have you ever been influenced by some of the crazy theories your fans come up with for mysteries in the books? Have you ever changed an aspect of your story based on fan feedback? I.e. if one of their theories is better than what you originally planned.

6:02No. But I am concerned about that possibility, which is one of the reasons I don't tend to read the fan boards. I mean, when the first fan boards started occurring and they started theorizing and analyzing the books in such detail, and I'm going back now to the mid-90s, really, when the first boards appeared, Dragonstone coming out of Australia that Peter Gibran I think was the first board I was aware of and a couple others came up after that. I was very flattered and I did read all the theories and then precisely this point occurred where it says you know what if they're guessing the things that I haven't revealed yet what if they guessed them correctly how does that affect me do I then say oh my god they figured it out already I better change it or do I just ignore it and plow ahead and what if they come up with better ideas than the ones I had?

6:55Do I steal them? And I didn't like any of these possibilities. So I said it would be better for me to try to keep my distance and not go on these boards and try to... Somehow it was a futile effort because people also write me emails and people come to public forums like this and they come up to me at signings and whisper their theories in my ear and things like that. So I am kind of aware of some of the speculation out there, but I try to keep my distance from it precisely because I don't want to be impacted. I mean, you know, it's one of the drawbacks of the whole internet culture and this world that you guys have created, that something that previously maybe one reader in a thousand would have guessed, but you still had the other 999 who would have no inkling until you reveal it in a book.

7:53Now that one person in a thousand puts it on an internet message board and everybody sees it and they say, oh yeah, yeah, that's right. Now I see the clues. I got it. And pretty soon half the readership, or at least the internet savvy portion of your readership knows it. But what do you do then? Do you change it and come up with something goofy and outlandish that you haven't led the, you haven't done the foreshadowing for, that you haven't laid the foundation for just in order to surprise people? I mean, sure, I could have, like, aliens come down, and that would certainly surprise the head of everybody.

8:27No one is predicting that, but it would ruin the series. So basically you can't let yourself be influenced by this stuff, and I try not to. Great. So Rita Meyer, who is a Googler, asked, as a result, you know, as a sub-question, with the books now being adapted for a successful TV series that you also write for, do you think this will have an influence on the decisions and choices you make in the novels? Well, once again, no. I hope not. The novels are novels. The TV series is the TV series. And they're two different beasts. The TV series is very faithful so far. I do write for a series. I do one episode per season.

9:15I'm also a co-executive producer on the series. I have a great relationship with David Benioff and Dan Weiss, who are the showrunners and the main writers on the series. But ultimately, that's their baby, and the books are my baby. And there is the possibility that as faithful as we've started out and as faithful as we intend to be, that changes will come into effect, what I call the butterfly effect, which I'm sure, you know, being the audience you are, you all understand because you've read Ray Bradbury's The Sound of Thunder, you know. You step on a butterfly in the Pleistocene and it seems very minor, but suddenly you return to the future and all of human history has changed because of that butterfly.

10:00A small change can produce large changes later on. And that's a question on the show. I mean, we've already seen in the first season, as faithful as it was, at least two significant departures. One character who has his tongue torn out with hot pincers, who later in my books, that doesn't happen to him. And he's around and gets involved pretty seriously in some stuff in book three. He's not going to be around to do that. So David and Dan are going to have to remove that stuff or create a new character or somehow address that problem. Similarly, the great scene in book one or in the first season where Khal Drogo confronts the man Mago and the Dothraki blood writer and rips out his tongue.

10:55Terrific scene completely made up by largely by Jason Momoa and by Dan and David. It doesn't happen in my books. Mago is still alive in the books and still has yet to be dealt with. So these kind of butterfly effect things may produce changes down the road. But, I mean, what am I going to do? Go back and retroactively rewrite book one? Maybe I should. That throat scene was great. But, no, I can't let myself be affected. I am aware of what they're doing in the show. I advise Dan and David whenever they're about to hit the butterfly effect and sometimes they change according to that and sometimes they plunge ahead.

11:36So the two beasts are the two beasts and each one is separate from the other. Okay. So coming from Tanati in Slovenia, what was your favorite, and well now we know this, what was your favorite and least favorite scene in HBO's Game of Thrones? My favorite scene, well this of course, I suppose everybody's seen the series now, I don't have to worry about giving things away. My favorite scene had to be the end of episode 9, the execution of Ned. I thought they did that very powerfully. It was not precisely as described in the books, but it was certainly moving and evocative. The director did a great job on it.

12:19The scriptwriters did a great job. They added a wonderful grace note, which is when Ned is being led up to the stairs where he sees Arya and he says to Yorin of the Night's Watch as he passes him, he says, Baelor, to set in motion Yorin saving Arya, which is not in the books. In the books, Yorin just spots her on his own and takes his own initiative. But it was a great idea to give that little moment, that one last kind of heroic act by Ned. So I love that. I love what they did with that moment. But there were a lot of great scenes that I love. The final scene with Dany, the season closing episode, you know, which I was in considerable trepidation about because, you know, how good were the dragons going to be?

13:06That's a big CGI thing. And, you know, it's a reality of television today that television has become so good and the technical standards of television have become so good that a large portion of the audience is judging us on the basis of what they're seeing on major motion pictures. so we always have to run the risk of if we do CGI people say well it's not as good as what I saw in Lord of the Rings or in the latest big budget science fiction picture and it's so frustrating because of course those shows have immensely more time than we do and they have budgets that are 10, 20, 100 times our budget and there was a time when the audience made that distinction they did not expect expect a chase scene on an episode of TJ Hooker to match what they would see in Bullet or The French Connection or a major motion picture cop scene at the time.

14:06But now they do expect it and it's a challenge for our special effects guys and our technical guys to live up to. We have a very sizable budget for a television show but it's still a television budget and It's not a feature film budget. So we're always having to wrestle with that. Least favorite scene? You know, I don't know that I really have one. I suppose my least favorite scene that actually appeared on camera would be the hunting scene where Robert is boar hunting because there was like Robert and Renly and Barristan were sort of tromping through the woods alone. And I talked to Dan and Dave and said, you know, there should be like a hundred other guys and horses and tents.

14:58And when the king goes hunting, it's not like, okay, I'm walking through the woods with a spear here.

15:07And, you know, they don't disagree with that. I mean, they said, yeah, we would have liked all that stuff too. But once again, it's budget. You know, we had an hour to shoot that scene and our horse budget was exhausted for the season. So there we were. So, you know, the reality is, I mean, the great thing about writing books, as I do now, is that my budget is unlimited. I can write anything that I can think of. And I'm limited only by the size of my imagination and by the size of the imagination of my readers. But when you translate it to television and film, you have the realities not only of the budget, which I've mentioned, but also the shooting schedule.

15:51You know, you have to keep on schedule. And if you have a lot of trouble getting the scene you were supposed to shoot in the morning, that gives you less time to shoot the scene in the afternoon. But you can't slop over to the next day or you start getting a rolling effect and you fall further and further behind your shooting schedule. And then you're more and more over budget and it becomes a mess. So all of that impacts too. And this is all the kind of behind the scenes, I don't know, technical stuff that really the viewers should not have to worry about. The viewers really should just have to view the final product.

16:25But nonetheless, for those of us concerned with behind the scenes stuff, it's a reality of life. The actual thing, I mean for the most part I loved all the scenes that were in the books that they translated to the TV show. I think they did all of those great. I also love the vast majority of the new scenes that they did. If I have any quibbles with the show, and they are quibbles, very minor thing, it was the missing scenes, the scenes that weren't there at all. As I watched the show, frequently I would find myself thinking, oh, okay, now they're getting up to this scene, that's really good, I can't, oh, they didn't have that scene.

17:05They skipped over that scene. Some of them were scenes that I had seen the actors do in auditions. They had been scenes that actually had helped the actors get their roles. So I really expected them because I already knew, oh, the actor will do this great. I saw them do it in an audition, you know, sitting in a room in front of a curtain. And now I'm going to get to see him do it in costume on the set. And then, oh, it's not there. So I would have loved to have two more hours to have a 12-episode season instead of 10. and, of course, to have an extra$50 million. But who of us wouldn't want an extra$50 million?

17:42They did do a great job. As a fan, when your only complaint is that Syria has hair and that one guy looks like Orlando Bloom, it's a really serious... We get a fair amount of people who are upset about no purple eyes, too. Why aren't their eyes purple? Well, try wearing purple contacts to see how you like it. So Dan, we have some Googler questions that were collected through Google Moderator, and we'll kick off with one of these right now. This one's from Peter in San Francisco. He writes, the sex, nudity, violence, and gore in the HBO series, so continuing with our previous question, has been very much like the books.

18:19It preserved a similar feel. Could you please discuss the creative process around the inclusion of this mature content? Was there any pressure to tone it up or down? Well, of course, there was no pressure on me because I'm hardly involved. I mean, I am basically a consultant who writes one episode per season. And so whether there was pressure on Dan and Dave to go one way or another, I really don't know. If so, they didn't share it with me. You know, we did make some decisions early on that we wanted to include that material. and the biggest one is where we took the show. When Dan and Dave and I decided that we would do this project together and I attached them, we discussed this at some length and said, you know, we have to go.

19:12HBO was our first choice and pretty much our only choice. If HBO had said no or they weren't interested, yeah, we could have gone to another couple of our cable outlets. But I think we were all agreed right from the beginning that we weren't going to go to traditional networks, ABC or CBS or NBC or any of those, simply because they would have made us remove all of that material. Everything would have been gone and much toned down violence, no sex whatsoever or just sort of a few hints of sex and certainly no inappropriate sex. And you know, a fantasy series, they would have slaughtered us as an 8 o 'clock show.

19:53I mean, And I've been through this in my Hollywood years. I worked 10 years in Hollywood from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s. And I worked on a couple shows, Twilight Zone, the Twilight Zone revival, and Beauty and the Beast, both of which were 8 o 'clock shows. Despite the fact on both shows we kept saying, we don't want to be an 8 o 'clock show. We want to be like a 9 o 'clock or a 10 o 'clock show because the standards and practices, the censorship of things are a little looser there. and you can do a little more material. And, you know, the network guys would promise us, oh, well, we know that.

20:28We really think of you as an adult show, not a kiddie show. But, you know, we have no room on a schedule. So we'll put you as an 8 o 'clock show, but we'll treat you as a 9 o 'clock show. And then we would be put as an 8 o 'clock show. And those guys who were the programming guys would suddenly no longer be around. And instead we'd be dealing with standards and practices guys who were censors who would say, I don't care what programming told you. You're an 8 o 'clock show. And these are our 8 o 'clock standards. So we made a decision right away. We're going to go with HBO. HBO has that kind of stuff, whether it's a 7 o 'clock show, an 8 o 'clock show, a 5.30 show.

21:03They don't care. You know, you're signing up for HBO. You're paying a subscription. You know what you're getting. And what you're getting is something you can't get on the over-the-air networks. So that's part of it. And then the other big decision we have to make to keep all that material, was the ages of the characters. You know, in the books, Danny is 13 years old when all of this begins. And I was drawing, although my books are fantasy, they're not historical fiction in a strict sense. They occur in imaginary world and imaginary kingdoms. They're very heavily based on real medieval history.

21:47And of course, I've done a ton of research about real medieval history. and basically in the middle ages they did not have our concept of adolescence of this sort of teenage year in between where we're kind of adults but we're not adults and we have different ages where we're allowed to vote at this age and we're allowed to go to war and die at a different age and we're allowed to drink at another age and to have sex at a different age depending on which state we're in all of that stuff they had child and adult and the difference between them was the onset of sexual maturity and we still have in our cultures remnants of this older structure in our ceremonies the Jewish bar mitzvah the Catholic confirmation ceremony which I went through as 13 you know reaffirming as an adult the the vows made for me by my godparents at baptism you know that's that the Catholics once considered 13 adulthood.

22:50And I promise you that even when I went through my confirmation ceremony, my parents no longer did not consider me an adult, even afterwards that I went through to write a passage. So, you know, these things are just remnants now, but they weren't remnants in the Middle Ages, and they're not in the books. We have a very different way of looking at things. So I was using that based on historical precedent. but there was no way that was going to fly in our present environment. We couldn't do that. If we had cast a 13-year-old Danny, there could have been no sexual stuff whatsoever with her.

23:29And even if we had cast like a 17-year-old actress playing a 13-year-old, there are some very stringent laws in like the United Kingdom. You can't do that. Even if you have an actress who's past the age of consent playing someone who's under the age of consent, you cannot have a sexual situation because it gets into the old child pornography thing and stuff like that. So we have a 22-year-old actress playing a 17-year-old Danny instead of a 17-year-old actress playing a 13-year-old Danny. And, you know, we did that deliberately so we could include this material. So I think that speaks to the fact that we did think it was necessary to the story we wanted to tell and all that.

24:13Of course, once you make that change, then you have to make all of the other changes, and you have to age up the other characters, because Dany's birth ties to the, you know, she was born posthumously nine months after the Battle of the Trident and the fall of King's Landing. And so the ages of the other characters have to be adjusted accordingly, and it becomes a whole, you know, once again, the butterfly effect. and said the whole thing is a tapestry and you can't just change one string without the whole thing unraveling. So Dan and David made this whole series of changes, but a long answer to a short question I guess.

24:48Good answer though.

24:52So I know you've got the prequel novellas out there, but DNJ7Lisa in San Diego asks, would you ever consider writing a prequel to Song of Ice and Fire series once it's finally done, such as the backstory of Lyanna and Rhaegar or Ned and Robert. I'd love to see how it all started. And by the way, when you're answering the questions, feel free to correct the pronunciation. It's come up a few times. You know, I don't have any plans to do any of those stories, but I never rule anything out. You know, if I get an inspiration or one of those stories suddenly takes hold on my imagination and won't let go, sure, maybe I'll do something like that.

25:35One of the things I've been trying to do with the series is to tell these stories, tell the stories of Robert's Rebellion and some of the stories of the history of Westeros in successive revelations and flashbacks and people remembering things. So at the same time the story is moving forward, it's also kind of moving backward. And gaps are being filled in. And you're learning. You hear about this event in the first book. And then you hear a little more about it in the second book. And then the third book, you hear about it from a different person who has a very different version of what happened from the previous versions you've heard.

26:09And then there's this hole in it which gets filled in the fourth book. So I hope by the time it's all finished, I will have expanded backwards as well as gone forwards. and many of the gaps will have been filled in and you'll know more about the whole Robert and Ragar and everything like that. But it's not quite the same as telling a story about them, I realize. I still have two more gigantic books to write, though. And six years to finish them. Right, yes, very fast.

26:44I don't know what I'm going to write after that. whatever seizes me. I mean, I like to do different things as a writer. This has been a huge project, certainly the biggest thing I've ever done in my life or career, but I've done other things and hope to continue to do other things. As much as I love Ice and Fire and fantasy, I also love science fiction. I want to do more science fiction work. I want to do more short stories. I love doing knows. Wild Cards, which is a series I've been working on even longer, Nice and Fire. I've been, in the beginning of Wild Cards, I wrote a lot for it as well as editing it.

27:22Now the series is still ongoing. Mostly I edit these days because I don't have time to write for it. But I'd love to go back and write some more Wild Card material about some of the characters for that. So what will I feel like writing after those six years are done? Who knows? whatever I feel like writing on that particular day. There was someone at the podium, I think, who had another... Hi. So we have another question. It is, given HBO's history of completely changing storylines, I'm looking at you, True Blood, how did you get them to stay so true as your complex-as-all-hell novels? Candy and chocolates.