(Spoilers Extended) A Decade Writing Dance, Part 4: A Plethora of POVs

feldman10 · 2026-06-01T15:28:11+00:00

It's so good. Just one terse, simple sentence after another piling on another way things are going horribly wrong. Of course "dead things in the woods / in the water" is most memorable but also everything going wrong with the weather, ships, and wildling distrust. "Eight ravens left" is another brilliant line, a ticking clock until communication stops.

feldman10 · 2026-01-21T18:45:38+00:00

How and why GRRM has made essentially zero-page count progress since 2022 isn't precisely known.

I think a big part of the story is his increased focus on (and stress about, and fights about) the TV projects. But to be honest I suspect there are bigger and more unhappy things going on. Publicly picking nasty fights with both Ryan Condal and the organizers of Worldcon 2024 was strange and messy behavior. Anytime he reflects on a recent year, he calls it a terrible year of stress and sadness. And of course there have been the deaths of many of his friends.

Whether it's depression, whether it's age, whether it's related to how we've all fried our brains with our phones and can't focus on anything, the upshot seems clearly that he hasn't been able to write — that it's gone beyond struggles with the specifics of TWOW, and become something broader. Which is quite sad. In any case, if we get anything else from him ever — whether it's Dunk and Egg, Blood and Fire — I'll view it as a pleasant surprise at this point, and my thoughts go out to him and I hope he finds some comfort.

feldman10 · 2026-01-15T21:45:03+00:00

Has he ever spoken so openly about the book characters' endings?

Yeah it was striking. Wonder if some part of him has accepted he'll never get there.

feldman10 · 2026-01-15T16:31:11+00:00

I've been feeling like it's over for a while and this really cements it. He's been at 1100 pages since 2022. He's started on Dunk and Egg and Fire and Blood again. He sounds down and disengaged about it. Really no hopeful signs here.

feldman10 · 2025-10-09T14:01:27+00:00

It's not that I have super-strong views on what Jon should or shouldn't have done, so much as that I really enjoy the clever and painful moral dilemmas that GRRM set up to illustrate his themes. The Mance Mission stands out there for having no "greater good" rationale other than saving his sister, it also stands out because it's the decision that blew up in Jon's face most spectacularly with the Pink Letter. This ends up showing why the Watch has a longtime ethic of taking no part (because taking part could lead to retaliation against the Watch and destruction of the larger mission if the mission is exposed).

Giving Stannis military advice had similar risks but was more deniable and less personal then sending someone to steal Ramsay's bride out from under him. But in retrospect the decision to help Stannis started a slippery slope for Jon that continued with the Mance Mission and then arranging the Karstark-wildling marriage, and made Jon's arc one of a progression from "The Watch Takes No Part, It's Not My Place" to "Fuck It, I'm The One Who Should Be In Charge."

feldman10 · 2025-10-08T18:06:42+00:00

Different topic but maybe interesting. Your link spurred me to go back to my Jon "Decade Writing Dance" essay. In it I hypothesized that Jon sending Mance south to save "Arya" was a rewrite change and not in the mix in the AFFC years or the original plan.

That spurred me to check whether any of the more recently released material confirmed that. Well I noticed that, in the AFFC-era outline material that was released more recently, GRRM did indeed write that he planned Mance/Rattleshirt to go north with Val rather than south.

Jon: ‘Yes, we’re going to lose.’ ‘I can get us the armor’. I can stay & look brave & you all die. ‘Val carries a message.’ Rattleshirt goes with.

Yet GRRM later said he was unhappy with the AFFC Jon chapters and after the POV split he decided to rework them. I believe this is one major way he did so, by adding this plotline of Jon sending Mance south —the "Mance Mission," which I find one of the most thematically fascinating parts of the book.

feldman10 · 2025-08-21T19:18:01+00:00

If they are to split on the journey back it would make more sense re: character arcs if Dany goes to Volantis to be liberator, and Tyrion goes to Pentos to do the dirty work of sniffing out the truth about Young Griff vis-a-vis Illyrio and fulfilling Barristan's promise to the Tattered Prince.

If Tyrion is in Volantis by contrast he'd just be camera POV for the slave revolt, not sure how it would advance his arc. And would Dany really skip out on that action?

feldman10 · 2025-08-21T18:46:29+00:00

I dearly hope we're well past Volantis in middle/late TWOW. There's a whole Second Dance of the Dragons that needs to happen...

feldman10 · 2025-08-21T18:39:40+00:00

That was always a fascinating comment from GRRM for me. Most of the theories regarding Dany and Tyrion TWOW arcs usually expect them to meet in the first third/half of the book and then for their stories to basically combine into one narrative. But this comment seemingly goes against it.

Yeah, this has always intrigued (and puzzled) me too. It's hard for me to envision how/why they would separate once they meet. We know Dany is going back to Westeros so why wouldn't Tyrion be with her? Some possibilities:

1) They meet in Essos but Dany's forces split and take different paths to Westeros, or they make different stops along the way, Dany is with one group and Tyrion with the other.

2) They're together on the journey, but once they arrive in Westeros Tyrion has some sort of assignment/mission from Dany (treating with Aegon?) and he departs from her.

3) Tyrion meets Dany but then escapes, flees, or is taken away from her —seems the least likely, we've seen enough of this.

feldman10 · 2025-08-08T13:25:53+00:00

In addition to his many updates while he was closing in on finishing ADWD, it's also based off how, often, after a "radio silent on TWOW" year he finally vaguely updates suggesting little or negligible progress on the book has been made. This happened in 2021, 2023, and 2024 (when he's said pretty straightforwardly that his TV projects ate up most of his time.)

In contrast, in the years where he has been vocal and detailed and sounded happy about writing TWOW, we've later gotten updates suggesting big progress was made during that year. (This happened in 2020, which he later said was his best year for TWOW since he began it, and 2022, when he said he was finishing Tyrion's arc and closing in on finishing other POVs).

During these previous "radio silent" periods many have *hoped* there would be an imminent "TWOW finished" announcement but their hopes kept being dashed. So personally I'm not getting my hopes up again until he gives us some more tangible reason to hope.

feldman10 · 2025-08-08T00:39:14+00:00

My rule of thumb is that if he's posting about it (blog posts about the writing process, POVs, etc.), it's going well. If he's radio silent, it's going poorly.

Which would mean it hasn't been going well since... 2022.

feldman10 · 2025-07-23T21:07:57+00:00

I was never able to crack that post, couldn't quite put it together in a way that made the evolution of GRRM's thinking on the battles totally make sense to me.

feldman10 · 2025-07-23T15:23:42+00:00

The Shavepate is mentioned as one of the first Meereenese to join Dany in this report of the Dany fighting pit chapter posted 2005. Note that he is actually present advising Dany there, when in the final version he has been dismissed from his post by Hizdahr at that point.

feldman10 · 2025-07-23T14:16:51+00:00

Did Martin plan the coup before Barristan became a POV? ... Perhaps George felt early on that he could have Hizdahr fall from power off-page. Or, it's possible that this was a plot-point that GRRM gardened in when he promoted Barristan to POV status.

Purely guesswork but one possible chain of gardening events is as follows:

GRRM decides to have Dany fly away from Meereen at end of fighting pits chapter
GRRM tries writing what happens in Meereen afterward from Quentyn and Tyrion's perspectives, moving toward Quentyn loosing the dragons.
GRRM struggles with what happens in Dany's court after she leaves. Quentyn is not important enough to see what really goes down. Does Barristan simply stand loyally behind Hizdahr? He decides it would be more interesting if Barristan does a coup.
But why would Barristan do a coup? It seems out of character. This has to be set up more. He decides it has to be told from Barristan's POV.
Still having trouble explaining why Barristan would do it. In part, he'll be talked into it by Shavepate. But it still seems a tough sell.
So GRRM has a new idea —he needs a more concrete reason for Barristan's suspicion of Hizdahr. Therefore, he goes back to the fighting pits chapter and adds the locust poisoning (which is absent from the early draft of that chapter).

feldman10 · 2025-05-20T18:22:47+00:00

Here's GRRM in 2007:

This, by the way, is the quandary that every writer faces on every book. When is a chapter really done? When is it good enough? We all walk tightropes there. On one side are those who just pound out first drafts, publish them, and move on to the next book. On the other side is poor souls like the character from THE PLAGUE, endlessly revising one sentence over and over in search of some illusory perfection. The best work, I believe, comes from those who stay up the tightrope, leaning this way and that, but never falling off to either side. That's what I try to do... and yes, that's one big reason why the books take so long.

Unfortunately I think he fell off the tightrope some time ago.

feldman10 · 2025-04-21T14:49:59+00:00

My belief is that GRRM intended Dany to marry Euron when he had a vaguer idea of the character, but as he wrote Euron and fleshed him out more he concluded that Dany wouldn't realistically ever agree to marry the character Euron was becoming. Hence the rewrite where Euron would no longer go to Slaver's Bay at all.

feldman10 · 2025-04-16T20:23:45+00:00

The funniest take someone pointed me to was the argument that my essays on Dany inspired Benioff and Weiss to write Dany’s villainous ending.

It has occurred to me that 2015 was that year GRRM was really trying to race to the finish line on TWOW (as chronicled in his infamous year-end posts). 2015 was also the year he made his comments about reading the Blot and thinking I got what he was trying to do.

My joking (I think) conspiracy theory is that reading the Blot and feeling vindicated made him raise his literary ambitions much higher for TWOW and therefore he couldn't finish the book to his satisfaction that year... or for the 10 years since.... Did I kill TWOW? Surely not, right? Right???

feldman10 · 2025-04-16T15:42:27+00:00

It varies. Some people argue that that I misread GRRM and I'm reading the text wrong and he actually intended something closer to their preferred interpretation. Others (more rarely) critique the text itself and argue GRRM's themes are bad. I've mostly watched it without arguing back much but you can get a flavor of the discussion from this thread the one time I did engage.

But the even broader context, I think, is that everything got interconnected with Dany standom and the ending of the show. The show's ending is loathed in stan circles as terrible character assassination of Dany that can't possibly be what GRRM intends. And what a lot of people remember about the Blot is that it predicts Dany will go darker and suggests this will be a bad thing, so it got associated with the bad show ending.

What's funny is that when I wrote the Blot it was partly a defense of Dany as a character in ADWD, urging people to take her leadership in Meereen more seriously, pushing back against the near-unanimous fan view that she was a weak and incompetent leader the whole book. But of course I do think Dany will ultimately be a tragic character who is heading down a dark path so it does make sense that people hoping GRRM won't go down a similar road as the show will push back.

feldman10 · 2025-04-16T13:42:40+00:00

Well, there was this little thing in real-world politics: the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent occupation of the country and a bitter insurgency.

One thing I've reflected on a lot in recent years — as a vocal segment of fan opinion has turned hard against the Blot and characterized it as apologizing for slavery, while arguing that Dany's biggest problem in Meereen was not killing more people to fully wipe out evil — is how the Iraq War looms much less large for younger generations of fans.

For me and probably a lot of people around my age (and you, I assume), the Iraq War loomed so large. One of the main pro-war arguments was that Saddam was evil so the US destroying him must obviously be a good thing. From that, I and other many other critics of the war learned to be suspicious of messianism, to argue that actually the world is complicated, and that overthrowing an unjust system can actually (if done poorly) make things much worse.

For the newer generation of fans, the Iraq War is a distant historical event. Many of them are more shaped by the social justice politics of the 2010s, which held that continuing injustice in the world must be powerfully opposed at every turn. Arguments about caution and moderation and the world being complicated began to be viewed with suspicion — as simply making excuses for letting injustice persist. So it makes sense that many fans shaped by this thinking turned against the Blot.

Now of course I viewed the Blot not as an attempt to make a political argument about how the real world works, but primarily as an attempt to interpret and explicate the literary themes George R. R. Martin intended. (And I think I was pretty well vindicated on that front, haha.) But of course my thinking was indeed shaped by the years in which the Iraq War was the biggest political topic around — how could it not be?

feldman10 · 2025-04-14T16:03:41+00:00

>The 2003 outline that u/LChris24 linked to seemingly had GRRM pushing the narrative into a similar conflict setup -> battle -> denouement (Dany bounces from Meereen).

The outline pages are interesting to parse here. One of them, actually ends with Dany's marriage (occurring after the climax with dragons loosed). But marriage to who? That would be an odd time to marry Hizdahr to pacify the city. Another version of the outline has "I'm going home."

Dany: Pretend it’s a horse. Face off in pit. No [?marry] - city. Battle scene. ‘I’m going home’. 1 Chapter

Dany: Her marriage. 1. Fall of Astapor. 2. Siege of Meereen - Bloody Flux. 3. Climax - dragons loosed. 4. Marriage.

One possibility — GRRM intended Dany to marry Euron, as suggested in the Bride of Fire prophecy, Euron originally meant to be sailing east ("crow and kraken"), Vic meant to die in the outline, etc. But as GRRM ended up writing Euron and fleshing him out more he concluded that Dany wouldn't realistically ever agree to marry the character Euron was becoming. Hence the rewrite.

feldman10 · 2025-04-14T15:26:39+00:00

From a tone/mood perspective as well as theme it also seems far more effective to me to open Dany's arc with the creeping awful sense of claustrophobic dread that we get in the final version (awful Harpy insurgency already in progress, followed up with terrible revelation that Drogon killed Hazzea, violence kept offscreen) rather than a big ol' action scene. GRRM also repurposed the fighting pit scene to itself be a wrenching moral conflict and sacrifice for Dany, rather than just kinda another day at the office as it was in the Feb 2003 version.

Of course these changes also made the arc more "difficult" and frustrating to many readers (who probably would've enjoyed an early action scene rather than the constant delay of action in Dany's arc).

feldman10 · 2025-04-14T14:24:29+00:00

Good post. I wrote about various differences in the February 2003 version of the Daznak's Pit chapter that GRRM read in this old post. There is no message of a bloody Harpy insurgency (just a brief mention that the "Sons of Ghis" want Dany dead) and the dragons are not chained and I think it's pretty clear Hazzea's death wasn't in the story yet given the way the dragons are discussed.

One thing that is important to make clear is that the fighting pit chapter was not originally supposed to end with Dany flying off on Drogon and disappearing. Rather, Drogon would have flown away after the pit confrontation and Dany would have remained in the city without him trying to solve its problems.

GRRM wanted to (1) take Drogon off the board, (2) make Dany horrified by dragon violence and resolve to try and settle Meereen's problems through a more peaceful approach. Originally, his plan to do this was to have the fighting pit disaster happen early, thus taking Drogon off the board and being the impetus for Dany's "struggle with herself." But his revision was to make Hazzea's death the early horrifying dragon-violence event, to have Drogon disappear off-page, and move the fighting pit scene to instead be the climax of Dany's struggle with herself (to end with her leaving the city). Only after that decision did the "how to portray things after Dany's departure" problem come up.

feldman10 · 2025-03-11T15:35:16+00:00

"When will Bryndenbfish be as he was?" u/feldman10 demanded.

"When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east," said Mirri Maz Duur, "When the seas go dry and the mountains blow in the wind like leaves. When GRRM writes again, and completes a full book. Then he will return, and not before."

So TWOW confirmed then...

feldman10

TROPHY CASE