Watch your back. Watch the skies. Watch out for…well, just about everybody. That seems to be the main lesson from A Song of Ice and Fire. That’s the book series that inspired the Game of Thrones series, and it was written by George R. R. Martin, whose 75th birthday is today.
Martin, whose “Rs” stand for Raymond Richard, was born in the definitely pedestrian town of Bayonne, New Jersey, in the US. His family was middle-class, but before the Great Depression had been wealthy, and Martin was reminded of that whenever he walked past the large dock (Bayonne is a port) and mansion his family owned before he was born. He’s said that when he was a child, his whole world consisted of the area of a few blocks (including those reminders of past riches) that he walked between home and school.
He started writing stories at a very young age — he would sell “monster stories” to his friends for pennies, and even do dramatic readings. He had to stop, though, because one of his classmates’ mothers complained he was giving the kids nightmares. He had another series of stories about a kingdom of turtles. He kept pet turtles, but they didn’t survive very long, so he turned that into tales of palace intrigue (among the turtles) where they plotted against each other and there were various assassinations.
Later on, in high school, he turned into a comic book fan, and has said that his greatest literary influence was Stan Lee, the publisher of Marvel Comics. He studied journalism in college, but instead of working as a journalist, started publishing short stories — mostly science fiction and fantasy. His first novel was well timed — he finished it at the time when Star Wars debuted, and science fiction became much more popular, so he was able to sell it for an excellent price. Even so, his writing didn’t quite pay all the bills, so he became, of all things, the tournament director for the Continental Chess Association. It was a paying job, but only on the weekends, so he could spend the weekdays writing.
In 1976 he gave up the chess gig and became an instructor at Clarke University, lecturing in English and Journalism. He kept that job for only a couple of years, though, and dedicated himself to full-time writing. By 1984 he was able to sell the screen and television rights for some of his stories, and the money was just enough to enable him to keep going as a writer. He hadn’t ever considered writing a series though, where several books used the same characters and settings — and it wasn’t even his idea. One of the publishers that had purchased his books suggested it, and he (somewhat reluctantly) gave it a try with a series of stories about his “Haviland Tuf” character. They sold! He was just about to write some more of them when he was hired as a writer and story consultant for television, which was the first job he ever had that paid pretty well.
That led, eventually, to his major work, A Song of Ice and Fire. It was originally supposed to be just three books, but now it’s slated to be seven, and Martin has finished the first five. He’s still working on the sixth one, and hasn’t even started on the seventh. This may harken back to the olden days — he’s said that as a boy he tended to write “endless stories” because he could never finish them.
