Interview with George R.R. Martin

- Daniel: Did you simply pick up where George and Gardner had left off with the story, or did you find things that needed to be restructured or otherwise revised before the story could move forward? It must have felt pretty sweet to be the one to get this tale back on track!?!

DA: Well the absolute first thing I did was retype it into a word processing program. You have to understand that the original manuscript was done on a manual typewriter. After that, I had to viciously cut about a third of the original (some of which made its way back into the novel). The fragment they gave me was 20,000 words long, and that's about the same length as the final novella. I didn't wind up restructuring much, apart from the condensing, though. And given the start that they had, I thought the ending was pretty obvious. That's often the case, though. Any good story, the ending is sort of implicit even at the beginning. And this is more than a merely good story, you know. It's a benchmark in modern SF. Says so right on the cover.

GD: Actually, I did my initial bit so long ago that we didn't have even manual typewriters, just carved things out on stone tablets. Sending the stone tablets to Daniel was quite expensive. Lots of stamps.

GRRM: Daniel is not quite accurate here. Gardner's original fragment was done on a manual typewriter, yes. (Gargy did not believe in margins either, so the words filled every inch of every page). When I got hold of the story, however, I retyped the whole thing and added my own contribution on an electric typewriter. I was very modern. (Then). I even added margins, which made the story seem much longer.

- Are there any other collaborations between you three in the works?

DA: There have been some vague rumblings and noises, but I think they were mostly George's fans sharpening knives in case he took on a project that wasn't ASOIAF.

GD: As said above, Never say never again. Actually, I think there's a decent possibility that we could do something again someday, although if Daniel keeps selling novels--he's committed to about 25 of them at this point, I think--he may not have the time.

GRRM: Another three-way? Not likely... although ever since we sold HUNTER'S RUN, I have been half-expecting that one day I will open my mailbox and find Gardner's legendary unfinished novel NOTTAMUN TOWN, the one he has been working on since the early 70s. I do expect that I will continue to work with both Daniel and Gardner separately, however. I lured Daniel into my WILD CARDS shared anthology series a couple of years ago, and I hope he will continue to be a part of the series for years to come. And the Great Gargoo and I are co-editing a couple of original anthology (more on those below), and will probably do more in the future if those are successful.

- One would think that collaborative efforts are much more difficult than individual writing endeavors. Some would be concerned with the style, pace, cohesion, etc, and think that it may influence their own part in the project. From an author's perspective, how did you approach this undertaking and how did the others (if at all) influence your own writing? Was it difficult to find consensus during the project or was there general agreement on where the story would go and a mutual agreement to allow artistic freedom to the other writer to take it and run with it?

DA: This sounds weird, but it wasn't actually something that came up much. We all contributed ideas on the main plot and the final product just grew out of it. There were some things that we didn't agree on stylistically. Gardner and I in particular have very different voices and attitudes toward things like description. But I figured if I wanted it to sound exactly the way I'd have written it, I should have done it myself. Collaboration means having a final product that is different from what any one writer would have done alone. Otherwise, what's the point?

GD: As a good modernist and therefore a minimalist, Daniel kept taking a lot of the color out, thinking of it as overwriting, but since both George and I are writers whose effect largely DEPENDS on the use of flamboyent local color, I kept putting it back in, and even adding more. I think it helped smooth out difference in style that one person--me--did the final smoothing and consolidating draft, as I could edit anything that seemed to veer too much from the overall "voice" of the book. I've found that it's best with three-way collaborations--of which I've done several, with various combinations of writers--to have one person do the final smoothing draft, ensuring reasonable consistency.

GRRM: Every collaboration is different. In the past, I have collaborated with Howard Waldrop, Lisa Tuttle, George Guthridge, Melinda Snodgrass, Michael Cassutt, David Peckinpah, Howard Gordon & Alex Gansa, and all the myriad writers of the Wild Cards Consortium, and it's never been the same experience twice. You have to change your working methods to match the personalities involved. And yes, Gardner is right, it does help if one of the participants has "final cut," so you don't find yourself stalemated by creative differences. HUNTER'S RUN began with Gardner and grew out of his universe, so it was appropriate that he have the final say. That being said, I don't think there were any major disagreements on this one.