Victim of his own success. He’s a great author when he had other people keeping him in check.
When he got super successful you could tell: Books got bloated and self-indulgent. Writing pretentious and more ham fisted. Nobody in the room telling him, “You need to cut this whole chapters of characters just standing around talking politics.”
This sort of thing happens with a lot of fantasy authors.
The Star Wars Prequels came out on a very consistent schedule. One every 3 years.
George Lucas more or less knew from the beginning of sitting down to make the prequels what he wanted to happen, and then he sat down and made it happen. GRRM has by his own admission largely been making it up as he goes along, and he seems chronically averse to sitting down and making anything happen.
Yep. I remember reading book series of an author and you could tell when success hit them; it was the moment when the books consistently had a lot more pages, while the content meandered more and could use editing.
E.g. one author started a book writing 200 pages of the protagonist living a calm life alone, secluded. Nowhere near where the story would happen or important characters. That was 1/3 of the book.
Authors can get too comfortable once they know it will sell anyway. They end up writing whatever flows from them and whatever they want to write. Unfortunately editors seem to allow it (to some extent), probably because like the authors, they know it will sell. So they might not want to be too strict.
He liked writing and had brilliant ideas. However I think he prefers sci-fi over fantasy. Between age, difficulty, money, and just not his preferred genre he’s just not in a hurry. He’s probably squirreled away enough for a post mortem conclusion to the series that another author can come in a cobble into a book on the same level.
He and his estate have specifically said that no one else will continue his story after he is dead. If he made a trust to handle the copyright it can last 70 years after his death enforcing that. No one reading this will likely ever get a written conclusion to the books.
A great author architects and plans the plot and creates deep characters with back stories before introducing them.
A great writer can take ideas and write them down in entrancing prose that keeps the reader engaged and wanting more.
GRR could write his ideas but he planned nothing. Might as well have been one of those "write a chapter a day" challenges that don't give you a chance to plan and are instead a way to practice writing.
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u/LordOffal 7h ago
Great author terrible writer.