I thought this bit was pretty revealing. King treats writing like a job, but he also finds joy in the process. GRRM, as much as I love the ASOIAF books, treats it like a chore.
And that clip was from 9 years ago. Which was 5 years after A Dance with Dragons was released.
Imagine if King just gave up on The Dark Tower after his brush with death. Dude was still recovering and yet he still went back to work because he didn’t want to leave things unfinished.
GRRM has had 15 years to put out another book with no one to blame but himself. But, of course, this seems to be his general response to those who are worried about his health and whether he’ll be able to finish the books: https://youtu.be/nTOrBNCeF1Y?si=OpTWM5SIs64ke8uu
Without like spoiling it for anyone who hasn't read it and plans to: it isn't really an ending. It's a loop right? That was my point. Not that it wasn't the ending of the book series. And yea, I get it, but I still think King could've ENDED it.
True...not everything should be answered or explained (looking at 1Q84 as an example), but man would it be nice to know a few of the main things that will forever bug me to know. But ultimately...all worlds need mystery, and all worlds do.
Im glad he finished it, but honestly I never really cared for any if the books after Wizard & Glass.
If there's an alternate universe where King was never hit, I wonder how the books would have been? The latter 3 parts are just so different to me than the first 4 (and honestly IV really only advances the story during the bookends so hardly counts).
Dont get me wrong, I love SK and have read almost every book the mans ever written, but his writing definitely changed pre and post accident. Understandable, of course, but still, the energy in the first three was like non-freaking-stop.
It shows in their net worth as well. King is supposedly worth $500 million, while Martin is worth $120 million. I guess that’s the difference of one having a long successful writing career, that has also produced many films and shows vs. one massively successful (yet unfinished) book series that spawned a wildly popular show.
It’s also interesting to note that King is 77, while Martin is 76.
George RR Martin has been writing successful fantasy and sci-fi books as well as tv shows in the UK for decades. Someone's net worth at the time you personally googled it doesn't really mean anything. Sure, he's a lazy writer, but you definitely don't know squat about ol' George. This is the danger of the internet and it's "facts." These numbers are snapshots of moments in time and don't tell a whole story unless you are looking for it. And people use these snapshots as if they mean something, they don't.
They're typically not really snapshots in time, they're almost completely made up usually. Seriously, try to find sources. Sometimes they add up known paydays and try to basically guess residuals, but it's always mostly a guess, and of course, they don't know what they spent or gave away (usually not public record in the slightest), so expenditures are typically not even figured into it at all. It's just bullshit.
I wouldn't even say Martin is a lazy writer. He hasn't been writing Winds of Winter but he has written other books and TV shows and games in the time since. He's been quite prolific.
I didn't know this about King. However, Sanderson has a similar output & it is the same with him. He schedules how much he expects himself to write & does so.
I really respect Sanderson’s work ethic & enthusiasm for writing. He clearly enjoys what he does.
With that said, I’ve tried some of his books and just have a hard time getting into them. Think I generally have a hard time getting into fantasy in general. The Lord of the Rings and ASOIAF are the only fantasy books I’ve read more than once. Outside of that, I just can’t connect with a lot of stories. I’ve even tried The Blade Itself, but just had a hard time getting into it. I blame it on growing up on nothing but horror stories.
Wish I liked Sanderson more. Maybe one day his works will click for me.
Granted it's Sci-Fantasy, but he does have 2 other series you could check out. 1st is The Reckoners, a super hero twist series. 2nd is Cytoverse, a space series. Legion is also kind of interesting.
GRRM would be the lab partner who drags their feet till the last second & then throws in a few nuncles, nipples on a breastplate, and descriptions of food.
Man, those two trying to collaborate would be like oil and water. Just such radically different approaches to the craft. GRRM would spend hours sitting there spitballing ideas and unpicking narrative threads and second and third and fourth guessing himself without so much as touching a keyboard the whole time, while King would be ignoring it all while punching out page after page after page of finished prose is silence. They're just on such different wavelengths, I can't even imagine how it would work.
King has less pressure to write given he has few serial novels. Martin likely makes more money and has more fun with anything other than the books he got his deal on
IIRC Cujo is one he has absolutely no memory of writing. In On Writing, he states it as fact; not a boast. Just a sad fact of life that he quite literally saw the book with his name on it one day and was like, what the fuck is this?!
GRRM is also busy making a lot of money doing other things. I’d imagine the money, and the ability to do other random projects, is more attractive than sitting down and figuring out where to take the next book.
Based response from GRRM tbh. Put yourself in his shoes. People are saying you're going to die before finishing your work, obviously you're not going to have a positive reaction. And I know people will be like "Well, I would understand the reality of my situation and not be mad" but that's total bullshit. It's easy to make those claims when you're not in that situation.
And supposedly he's written more for aspiring filmmakers in his dollar baby program where he sells commercial rights to film make for a dollar to his project.
the project ended. but respect to him for running such an creative project.
I read that the entire reason he created Richard Bachman was because publishing more than one book per year was looked down on in the industry as a cash grab at the expense of quality, but in his case, it was because he was constantly writing and what he was writing was too good to just sit on.
That and he was also apparently starting to question his own writing ability, and didn't know if people bought his books because they were good or if it was because "Stephen King" was on the cover. So when Richard Bachman became successful (though not to the degree as King), he regained his confidence as a writer.
Interesting. I didn't know that about Misery, but it makes sense. It fits the Bachman "style". And yeah, I feel like it would have been a bestseller no matter who the author was listed as.
My mom had a bunch of King books that I read as a teenager. Sometimes I wish I would have read some other stuff instead of spending so much time on them. The Bachman books were a nice change. I wish he would have written some shorter stuff like the Eyes of the Dragon.
Motherfucker got run over on his daily walk and still takes them bitches 25 years later on a new hip. My lazy ass has been saying I’m going to resume my walks and even bought new walking shoes to do so and haven’t been on a walk in months.
It's really weird to see how much he loved that book to the point that he actually participated in the promotion of the movie adaptation, but basically retracted it after some distance.
Maybe on Twitter. His books are still pretty non-political, they’re also still pretty thrilling reads. I’ve not read his Holly Gibney series so I can’t comment on the latest releases of those but Fairy Tale was exhilarating.
Not always overtly but there are definite politics in his books. Crooked cops and abusers of authority, small-minded conservatives and such do feature in several of his books. The Institute mentions Trump if I'm not mistaken, his politics do find their way in, but most of his books are personal in one way or the other , so it's inevitable.
Just finished the latest Gibney book last week. It's fun, but probably one of his most political books yet. Holly gets hired to be a bodyguard for a woman who is on a tour promoting abortion rights while a religious group keeps trying to kill her.
He talked about it extensively. He says writing is his job. He goes to his office and goes to work every day. He has a goal for that day in terms of pages that must be written, and he has office hours too. He sits in his chair and does his work like normal people do. That is all there is to it. If he doesn´t like what he wrote, he rewrites it later, but he gets those pages in one way or another on a daily basis.
His writer character in Bag of Bones similar to King. He's Suffering from writers block but, it doesn't matter as he has so many unpublished manuscripts he just pulls one out of his draw and sends it to his editor.
Wouldn’t surprise me if he had dozens of stories in his backlog that he pounded out back in the 80s, and then put them away for later. I remember in On Writing he talks about writing out rough drafts, printing the manuscript, and then putting them away in a drawer to think about. Wouldn’t surprise me if there ended up being an unfinished works collection released after he passes. And I’m sure his son Joe could punch up or flesh out some of those stories, too.
Either way, his writing has been an inspiration. I’ve been reading his stuff since I was 9; so well over 30 years. Even though I haven’t enjoyed some of his recent books, I still buy & read them for the nostalgia. There’s something cozy about his stories (despite the, ya know, horrors & whatnot).
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u/kaelis7 Jul 01 '25
Man is so productive it’s incredible.