Fire and Blood: An Evening with George R. R. Martin
“Then the storm broke, and the dragons danced.”
The scorching behemoth that is Fire and Blood is a sweeping history of the Targaryens from Aegon the Conqueror right through to Aegon III told from the perspective of Archmaester Gyldayn of the Citadel by way of a variety of primary sources including Mushroom the dwarf, who served as a fool at the courts of Viserys I Targaryen, Aegon II Targaryen, Rhaenyra Targaryen, and Aegon III Targaryen. Perhaps not since the Silmarillion has an entire fantasy world received such an expansive and indulgent victory lap (especially one undertaken before the race is complete).
On Thursday 8th August I got to see GRRM himself discuss all things Thrones at the appropriately sacerdotal Emmanuel Centre in Westminster with kindred history nerd Dan Jones, who could not have looked more thrilled to find himself sitting in that chair.
GRRM kicked off by recounting the story of how Westeros began in 1991. He was a producer finally making a name for himself in Hollywood when one day a scene burst into his head of a medieval lord and his young son stumbling upon a litter of orphaned direwolf pups in the “summer snows”. And because he is a “gardener” and not an “architect” (planting seeds and tending a wilderness instead of meticulously crafting a blueprint with every nook and cranny mapped out – a quintessentially epic writing analogy), he immediately wrote a hundred pages, one scene leading inevitably to the next, of the weirwood that would grow and warp and bloom into the beloved global phenomenon A Song of Ice and Fire.
He said he’s 97% gardener, the 3% accounting for the meticulously planned sequences like the Red Wedding, also the most difficult scene he’s ever had to write, one which he could only come back to after penning the entirety of A Storm of Swords first. (I, conversely, am 97% architect, evident in the fact I’ve been planning my current project since early 2015, have hundreds of thousands of words of material, and yet am still not ready to start the shiny new draft. Ask me again Christmas 2020 or, you know, 2030, depending on how the next decade’s chips fall.)
He also talked about Wild Cards, Windhaven, Fevre Dream, and Dunk & Egg, but his response to how he felt about the finished show? Well, he took a few seconds to think and then did a deep-dive into novel writing vs TV show writing, solitude vs collaboration, being the “god” of your own world vs “everyone having a fucking opinion”, and how neither of them were better, they were just different, as it is with books vs adaptations. And to the endless pontificating over which one is “true”, he said, “what is truth”, they’re all equally true the moment they exist in the minds of those that imagine them, yet simultaneously none of them are true, “we’re making up stories here”… At the end of the day, “ask yourself one question: how many children does Scarlett O’Hara have?”
AND TO ALL THE HATERS, DOUBTERS, DEMENTORS, PRETENDERS. YES, WINDS OF WINTER CAME UP, HE BROUGHT IT UP HIMSELF. AND YES, HE HAS EVERY INTENTION OF FINISHING IT, HE WAS JUST BUSY WRITING 350 THOUSAND WORDS OF TARGARYEN HISTORY. HE ALREADY HAS HIS NEXT, LIKE, TEN PROJECTS AFTER THAT LOCKED IN AND PLANNED. AND YES, HE WISTFULLY SAID IF ONLY THERE WERE MORE HOURS IN THE DAY AND HE WERE TWENTY YEARS YOUNGER. BUT THAT DOES NOT NEGATE FOR ONE SECOND HIS CONSUMING FIRE TO FINISH THIS SAGA. HE WILL ABSOLUTELY BE LIKE MOZART WITH THE REQUIEM, SCRIBBLING HIS STORIES OF WYVERNS AND WIGHTS UNTIL THE FINAL CURTAIN CALL.
“Words are wind, but wind can fan a fire. My father and my uncle fought words with steel and flame. We shall fight words with words, and put out the fires before they start.”
