It is no secret whatsoever that George R. R. Martin has a fondness of killing his darlings, to the point where every time he executes a character with a sentence he gets a semi (probably).
It is known.
Or perhaps not. In a new interview with science fiction and fantasy online mag Galaxy’s Edge (who low key must’ve been super pissed when Samsung royally screwed up their SEO), Martin claims to find it very hard to kill his characters, *actually*.
“I love all my characters so it’s always hard to kill them but I know it has to be done,” he said. “I tend to think I don’t kill them. The other characters kill ‘em. I shift off all blame from myself.”
So basically fuck these guys.
“I think a writer, even a fantasy writer, has an obligation to tell the truth, and the truth is, as we say in Game of Thrones, all men must die,” said Martin, explaining that he doesn’t use death for purposes like moving the plot along or savaging your soul.
“You can’t write about war and violence without having death. If you want to be honest it should affect your main characters. We’ve all read this story a million times when a bunch of heroes set out on adventure and it’s the hero and his best friend and his girlfriend and they go through amazing hair-raising adventures and none of them die. The only ones who die are extras.”
“That’s such a cheat. It doesn’t happen that way. They go into battle and their best friend dies or they get horribly wounded. They lose their leg or death comes at them unexpectedly.”
It’s not the first time Martin has invoked truth and honesty in explaining why his novels are so violent. in 2015, he explained the almost gratuitous number of rapes in A Song of Ice and Fire as being representative of the true, horrific nature of war, and that if you’re going to write about war it is “fundamentally dishonest” to do so without sexual violence.
“Death is so arbitrary,” said Martin. “It’s always there. It’s coming for all of us. We’re all going to die. I’m going to die. You’re going to die. Mortality is at the soul of all this stuff. You have to write about it if you’re going to be honest, especially if you’re writing a story high in conflict. Once you’ve accepted that you have to include death then you should be honest about death and indicate it can strike down anybody at any time. You don’t get to live forever just because you are a cute kid or the hero’s best friend or the hero. Sometimes the hero dies, at least in my books.”
Martin – as well as going deep, deep into fantasy literature and his early career in short stories and comics – also had solid advice to would-be writers.
“Writing is a terrible career if you’re looking at it as a way to have a career,” he said. (Fuck, she wrote.)
“You should not choose writing as a way to make money, to make a name for yourself or any of these other external things. If you have to write, if the stories are in you, if you made up names and stories for your toy spacemen when you were little, if the stories come to you, ask yourself the question, What if no one ever gives me a penny for my stories? Will I still write them? And if the answer is yes, then you’re a writer. Then you have to be a writer. It’s the only thing you can do. If the answer is No, I’m going to quit after a few years because I’m not selling, then maybe you should quit right now and learn computer science. I hear there’s a real future in these computer things.
Read the full interview over here.
Photos: HBO.
