George R.R. Martin: NEVER Read Your Fans' Theories

I wanna have dragons and dire wolves and mammoths and a wall of ice that's 700 feet tall. A minute ago, I don't like stories or books that are too familiar, that are too predictable, that I feel like I've read a thousand times before. Very few people get up in the morning and say, "Oh, I'm evil. What evil can I do today?" It's always said that "no" is the sexiest word you can say in Hollywood. The more you say "no," the more they want you.

He's an American novelist, screenwriter, and TV producer. He's best known for his series A Song of Ice and Fire, which was later turned into HBO's Game of Thrones. In 2005, Time Magazine called him the American Tolkien. He's George R.R. Martin, and here's my take on his top 10 rules for success. Rule number 2 is my personal favorite, and make sure to stick around all the way to the end for some special bonus clips. And as always, as George is talking, if he says something that really is meaningful to you, that has a big impact on you, Please leave it in the comments below so others can benefit from the experience as well. Enjoy!

And I started actually writing a science fiction novel that had been an idea I've been playing with a long time, a book called Avalon. And I was working on Avalon and it was coming pretty well, um, and suddenly the first chapter Game of Thrones came to me, where they find the direwolf pups. It's a freak! It's a direwolf. I knew it wasn't part of the science fiction novel I was writing. This was clearly a fantasy, medieval, had these wolves and this large family. I'd been reading a lot of historical fiction, and it might have been in the back of my mind. But suddenly it all gelled, and I wrote that chapter in, like, 2, 3 days. It just came to pour out of me. Lord Stark. There are 5 pups. One for each of the Stark children. The direwolf is a sigil of your house. They were meant to have them. You'll train them yourselves. You'll feed them yourselves. And if they die, You'll bury them yourselves. When I did return to books, I said to myself, okay, I've had many things optioned, they never make 'em. I've done pilots and TV shows, tried to keep 'em within budget and producible, they never make that. I'm tired of playing that game. I'm gonna, you know, I have a big imagination, I have an epic story I wanna tell, I'm gonna make it as big as my imagination, I'm gonna have all the castles and battles I want, I'm gonna have hundreds of characters 'cause the real world is complex, I want my fictional world to be complex too. Not a kind of simplified thing. I want to have giant battles, I want to have incredible castles that each one is distinct from the other, that people remember for all time. I want to have dragons and direwolves and mammoths and a Wall of Ice that's 700 feet tall. I want something huge and epic that can stand up there with Tolkien. Ask yourself, what if no one ever bought any of my work? What if I'm never going to sell a book or publish a book or a short story? Are you gonna continue to write? And if the answer is yes, because I have to, then yeah, then you are a writer. And whether you'll sell or not, I can't know, but if there are stories in you that have to get out, you wanna put them down on paper, whether you ever get the affirmation of a contract or a book in your hand or being on the bestseller list, if you still have to tell your stories, then you're a writer. If you can give it up, then it probably would be an act of sanity to learn accounting or something like that. I have tons of things I'd like to do, and life is short, unfortunately, but I hope it will be long enough for me to do some of these. I have known a few writers who have retired. I cannot imagine ever retiring. Writing and being a writer is too much part of my identity and too much part of what I am. I don't know what I would do with all that time if I did stop writing, you know, play video games or something like that, watch a lot more television. It seems unlikely to me. I've always told stories, whether I could make my living from it or even when I was a little kid, just making up stories for the other kids in the neighborhood. And I think I'm going to continue to do that until the end. Quite the little climber, aren't you? How old are you, boy? Ten. Ten. The things I do for love. I mean, not many shows or books have the guts to kill a 10-year-old, let alone after him catching an incestuous relationship. That's true. Probably even more surprising in a book where, of course, he's the first viewpoint. Viewpoint character. He's the viewpoint character in the first chapter, and then we switch away to a couple of viewpoints and don't come back to him, but since he was first, I think the assumption of most readers is that he's gonna be the main guy through that, and then suddenly you think he's dead, or maybe he's dead, but we find out more later. But, you know, it's what I— We write what we wanna read, and I, as I said a minute ago, I don't like stories or books that are too familiar, that are too predictable, that I feel like I've read 1,000 times before. So I wanna keep you on edge and surprise you and make you think that no one is safe, and that was certainly the intent there, and that scene has, I think gotten a lot of people hooked on these books and said, you know, I thought I was reading just another fantasy till I hit that scene, and then I realized that this was something a little different. So that moment has worked very well for me. You are no knight. You have forsaken every vow you ever took. So many vows. They make you swear and swear. Defend the king, obey the king. Obey your father, protect the innocent, defend the weak. But what if your father despises the king? What if the king massacres the innocent? It's too much. No matter what you do, you're forsaking one vow or another. I think the struggle between good and evil is central to fantasy, and indeed, in some ways, central to most fiction. It's certainly a worthy subject for fiction. But where I think I differ is I regard the struggle between good and evil as being waged within the individual human heart. It's not waged as fantasy would have it, where a character called the Dark Lord gathers all the evil people together and puts them in black clothing, and you know they're evil because they're really ugly, and all the good people are handsome and they wear white, and they meet on a big battlefield. In the real world, good and evil people are not that complex. Very few people get up in the morning and say, "Oh, I'm evil. What evil can I do today? I'm going to cover the world with darkness and my legions of evil will rule all." That's silly, you know. The greatest monsters of history, as we look back on them, thought they were the heroes of the story. You know, the villain is the hero of the other side, as sometimes said. That doesn't mean that it's all morally relative. That doesn't mean that all things are equally good and evil. I think there is good and there is evil in the world, but, you know, it's sometimes a struggle to tell one from the other and to make the right choices. And all of us— I've always been attracted to great characters, maybe because that's what I see when I look around the real world, whether I read about it in history books or the news news or just people I meet. I mean, all of us have it within ourselves to be heroes. All of us have it within ourselves to be villains. We've all done good things in our lives, and most of us have also done selfish things, cowardly things, uh, things that we're ashamed of in, in later years. Uh, and to my mind, that, that's I don't know, the glory of the human race. We're such wonderfully contradictory, mixed-up creatures that we're endlessly fascinating to write about and read about. David Benioff and Dan Weiss are the showrunners. You know, I don't have any veto power. You know, I signed a pretty standard contract where I gave them rights to adapt this into a television series, and I got certain Titles and the agreement I'd write one script a year and a large dump truck full of money. And they can do, you know, they can have the aliens come down next season. They can turn the whole cast into vampires. And I'm powerless to stop them, but I don't think they will do that. They love the books and they seem committed to telling my story in a different medium. And I knew all that before I signed any of the contracts. I mean, when these books started hitting the New York Times bestseller list, which was as early as Clash of Kings, I was approached by other people who wanted to adapt them, many for feature films. And I had meetings with those people and, you know, heard their plans. How are they gonna fit this giant thing in a a feature film? Well, we're gonna make it all about Jon Snow and we'll drop all these other characters, or we'll make it all about Dany and we'll drop all these other characters. They had various schemes of how they would do it. Or, well, we'll just make the first book up to this point and then, you know, we hope that the movie will do well enough that they'll order a second movie. And none of these really appealed to me, so I said no. Which is— it's always said that "no" is the sexiest word you can say in Hollywood. The more you say "no," the more they want you. And I guess that was true because they kept coming. And eventually David and Dan came, and we had a wonderful meeting that lasted like most of a day. We met for lunch, and we were talking and getting all animated about how we were going to do the series over lunch and in a crowded restaurant in Los Angeles, and little by little it emptied out, and pretty soon we were the only people there, you know, drinking our 7th cup of coffee and iced tea and still talking about it. And then more hours passed and we're still talking, and the restaurant, the dinner crowd is coming in, and they're setting up for dinner. I think we closed that restaurant that night. So it was one of those classic meetings that you only get once in a while, but I had a great feeling about them. I mean, You know, if you're J.K. Rowling, you can go into a situation where every studio in Hollywood wants you, and you can set very stringent terms where you get to approve everything. But, uh, I'm— if you're not J.K. Rowling, and virtually nobody is J.K. Rowling except for J.K. Rowling, then, uh, you can't do that, and you have to find people that you trust and put your faith in them and in the understanding of the story. I think I was a sophomore in high school, and I was kind of a nerdy kid, you know, I wasn't one of the cool kids. I wasn't good at sports. I was good at, you know, honor roll and stuff, but that doesn't cut any slack in school. That just gets you more abuse. But sophomore year, one of my English teachers was teaching Poe's "Pit and the Pendulum." And he said, "You know, this story has a terrible ending. If you remember that story, the guy's in the pit, the pendulum's coming lower and lower, and then suddenly in the last paragraph trumpets sound and the pendulum pulls up and he's saved. The Inquisition is in the hands of its enemies," is the last thing. And you know, my English teacher said this is a classic example of the deus ex machina. So our assignment was to write a better ending for "The Pit and the Pendulum." [Speaker:MG] Oh boy. So I wrote an ending where the rats came out and ate the guy, and they ate his cheeks, and they ate his toes, and, you know, they ate his face, and the pendulum cut him in half, and he died horribly screaming in horrible pain. I thought it was a much better ending than the one that Edgar Allan Poe came up with. It has a certain uplift to it, I feel. It does. But what was the real boost for me is the teacher liked it too, and he had me read it to the class. And suddenly, suddenly all these kids who'd never thought much of me thought I was the coolest kid in class, man. Wow, what a great story. The rats ate the guy, they loved it. And I said, "Oh, I gotta do more of this writing stuff, it really pays off." When you're writing fantasy, I've never, obviously, I've never been a prince, I've never been a king, I've never murdered anyone, I've never been a dwarf, I've never been an 11-year-old girl. So, you know, the question is, how do you write these characters? Well, there's a certain amount of stuff that you have to get by doing research. You have to talk to people who actually have had these experiences. Like when Bran was crippled by his fall, I had a couple correspondences with readers of mine who were paraplegic and had no use of their legs. And described to me some of the consequences, some of the things I might not have thought of, and made suggestions to me of how better to write that, and I certainly took that sort of stuff into account. But then the main thing is empathy, and saying, "Well, okay, how would I feel?" 'Cause the character is still a person. There's a certain basis of common humanity, and that's true when writing about women, or writing about a dwarf, or writing about any of this. You have to start with the basis They're more like me than they are unlike me. They have some special condition that they have a different set of genitals than I do, but they still— it's still the same old story, a fight for love and glory, right? We all want kind of the same things out of life, and that humanity can motivate characters and make them real, and that's what I try to remember at all times. When you write, when I write anyway, I want to engage my readers' emotions, or my viewers' emotions. You don't want, you know, death. Death is a big thing, you know. When we experience death in real life, it affects us, you know. When a spouse dies or your parents die, your brother dies, your dog gets run over, or God forbid, one of your children dies, rips your heart out. It affects you emotionally. If we're creating characters that we really care about, we should react in a similar way when they die in fiction or on television. It shouldn't be just, "Oh, okay, that character's dead. Let me go out and get a sandwich during the commercial." I mean, then you're not doing your job. I wanna grab hold of my readers and make them cry and make them grieve and make them laugh as well and experience joy, experience the worlds on the page as well. As if they were living them. That's the dream of me, at least, and I think of most writers. How did you decide on the name Hodor? Um, that's not his real name, that's just what they call him. His real name is Walder. If you were named Walder, you might want to be a cold photo or two. I don't know, you have to keep reading. Hold the door! Hold the door! Hold the door! Hold the door! Open the door! Open the door! Open the door! Open the door! Hold it off! [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Hodo, hodo, hodo, hodo, hodo, hodo, hodo.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I made this video because the balls asked me to. So if there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile next, leave in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know which rule was your personal favorite and why. What impact is it going to have on your business or life, please leave it down in the comments. I'm gonna join in the discussion. I also want to give a quick shout out to Tuan Nguyen. Thank you so much for picking up 10 copies of my book and leaving that awesome picture on the Amazon review. I really, really, really appreciate it. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon.

You have to read widely. That's one thing that I, I try to hammer home, especially at things like a comic book convention or science fiction convention, because the fans I've met, and this has been true for decades, many of the fans I meet read a lot, but they read very narrowly. They discover at a very early age they like superhero stories, and then they read nothing but superhero stories. Or they like science fiction, and they read that. That's fine, and I like superhero stories too, and I like science fiction and fantasy, but I also read mystery novels. I also read a lot of historical fiction. I also read literary fiction, and you know, I, Raymond Chandler and F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Goldman and Dennis Lehane and people like that are marvelous writers. The more you read, the more you see the techniques being used and what different people were doing, the more you learn.

Have 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? Hahaha. Uh, no, but I am concerned about that possibility, which is 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 Gibb ran, 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. 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? Do I steal them? And I didn't like any of these possibilities. 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's a futile effort because people also write me emails and people come to public forums like this and, you know, 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. Now, 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 hell out of everybody. No 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. I'm writing The Winds of Winter, which is book 6 in the series, and I hope the next-to-last book. Uh, the last book will be A Dream of Spring. Once those are done, then I can take a rest and enjoy a few of the accolades and the fruits of success that have accumulated to me, and then go back to writing something or other. And I'll be a different person then, and the world will have changed, and I'll see what I feel like writing in whatever year that happens to be. I should be doing that right now. You're interfering with me. I'm sure this book will be a year late just because of you.