Palacký University in Olomouc Philosophical

Game of Thrones

He was still working for the studio at that time, but he knew he will have some spare time for writing in the summer to come and he began to work on a science-fiction novel called Avalon. He was working on it when a sudden glimpse of a young boy witnessing a beheading came through his mind and he wrote it down immediately. It later became the first non-prolog chapter in the series. “It's from Bran's viewpoint; they see a man beheaded and they find some direwolf pups in the snow. It just came to me so strongly and vividly that I knew I had to write it. I sat down to write, and in, like, three days [the chapter] just came right out of me, almost in the form you've read,”²⁰ Martin has said for the Rolling Stone. He submitted the first hundred pages to his agent together with a summarized plan for the whole trilogy and he succeeded so he fully immersed himself into the writing process, with the book titled A Game of Thrones eventually being published in 1996. But as he kept writing he realized his story was becoming too complex to be presented in

¹⁹ “Interview – George R.R. Martin,” January Magazine, accessed August 15, 2016, http://januarymagazine.com/profiles/grrmartin.html.
²⁰ “George R.R. Martin: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, accessed August 15, 2016, http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/news/george-r-r-martin-the-rolling-stone-interview-20140423.
three books only and changed his initial plan to four books, six books and eventually to seven books.²¹
The second part of the story – A Clash of Kings – was released in 1998 and it was the first one to make it to the best-sellers lists. The story started to draw attention of various filmmakers, who wanted to adapt it as a feature film, but George refused them all. He had an experience in movie industry and knew it could not be done without cutting out too many storylines and settings.²²
Martin was several months late turning in the third instalment – A Storm of Swords – mostly because it was the longest one at that time – 1500 pages in manuscript, but it eventually came out only two years after A Clash of Kings, in 2000.²³ The number of producers’ offers increased after the global success of The Lord of the Rings movies, but Martin knew the only way his books could be remade is a series – a series made by someone like HBO who would not be scared of its violence and sexuality.²⁴
At this time Martin was working with the idea of hexalogy and him being in the middle of the story. He initially wanted to make a five-year story gap between the third and the fourth book to let his younger characters grow older, but he later realized he does not like all the flashbacks and retrospective that was needed for this and decided to include another book in the series.²⁵ He transformed his already written 250 pages long prologue into point of view chapters and kept writing until there was around 1700 pages of manuscript and he was not done yet. ²⁶ A friend of him suggested to split the story geographically into two volumes with A Feast for Crows covering mostly the characters from King’s Landing, the Iron Islands and Dorne and the later volume A Dance with Dragons telling the stories of characters from the North and those currently across the Narrow Sea – “to tell the story completely for some characters in A Feast for Crows, and to tell the story for some different characters, but within the same time frame, in A Dance with Dragons. In



²¹ “His Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: George R. R. Martin Talks ‘Game of Thrones’,” The New York Times, accessed August 15, 2016, http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/his- beautiful-dark-twisted-fantasy-george-r-r-martin-talks-game-of-thrones/.
²² “His Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: George R. R. Martin Talks ‘Game of Thrones’.”
²³ “Interview – George R.R. Martin.”
²⁴ “His Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: George R. R. Martin Talks ‘Game of Thrones’.” ²⁵ “George R.R. Interview,” Fantasy Online, accessed August 15, 2016, http://web.archive.org/web/20040818173139/http://www.fantasyonline.net/cgi- bin/newspro/101242423282166.shtml.
²⁶ “A Fantasy Realm Too Vile for Hobbits,” The New York Times, accessed August 15, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/12/books/a-fantasy-realm-too-vile-for-hobbits.html.
that sense, A Dance with Dragons is not the fifth book, but is more like four B. The two books run in parallel, and both begin five minutes after the end of A Storm of Swords.”²⁷