'Winds of Winter' author George R.R. Martin talks about his writing process and ending to the book series

An old interview of “Winds of Winter” author George R.R. Martin has surfaced online. The video shows the author talking about his writing process and explaining how challenging it is to write the books in “A Song of Ice and Fire” series.

Martin’s interview with Al Jazeera America posted on YouTube shows the author saying that sometimes he feels that he may have undertaken a task that may be difficult for him to handle. “Did it really have to be seven kingdoms? Why couldn’t it have been five kingdoms,” Martin often tells himself, the author revealed.

Talking about the origins of his popular book series, Martin explained that the series was a result of his decade long experience in Hollywood. The author used to write scripts at that time and he was often told by producers to cut down the number of characters and reduce the sale of massive battles to a duel between the hero and the villain.

Martin always loved his first drafts and later felt that he should go back to what he loves most, which is novel writing. Writing novels allowed the author to make it expansive and have any number of characters. The massive scale of “A Song of Ice and Fire” may now be making it difficult for the author to complete the next book “Winds of Winter.”

The author started off with nine points of view characters and later expanded that number to about 35. Martin said that when he was a young writer he experimented with different styles like omniscient point of view and first person point of view, but he later settled with his current style and said that most of his writings now have a similar structure.

In order to help him finish “Winds of Winter,” Martin keeps charts, maps, genealogy and other files on the book series. This helps him to refresh himself about what is going on in the story. The author said that he has always had an ending for the book series in mind in “broad strokes” and knows the future of all the major characters, but he later added that things may change if he thinks up a better plot twist or idea.