Foreword by Dawnrider: Getting this up here is mostly Iliana's doing, not mine, but I would like to say that we were very surprised when Rayin came to us with this article. We didn't expect people to come up with things like this off the bat, so to speak. Since then, he has transcribed the entire interview and edited it with Iliana, which is a massive amount of work. I personally really enjoyed reading it, and I hope you do too. If you do, then please drop him a personal message or e-mail to say thanks for all of his hard work. You can get his details from his name, linked on the left :)

I am currently a senior at Santa Fe High School in New Mexico. As all seniors know like all the other students we have to do book reports too. My father works for a contracting company here in Santa Fe. George had talked my dad's boss about doing some work on both of his houses, and my dad's boss said "Sure."

My dad found out who George was and told me, of course I had no idea who he was at the time. I went out and bought one of George's books and it happened to be A Game of Thrones. I liked what I was reading so I went out and bought the next book A Clash of Kings. I had really begun to like George's work. I hadn't gone out to buy the third book yet, seeing how it hadn't come out yet. I still haven't read it yet to this day!

While my dad was structolighting George's fireplace he asked me to help with it. (For those of you who don't know what structolight is, it's basically a finish-like plaster for walls and other things, such as fireplaces.) The first time I met George I was abashed. He looked completely different from what I thought he looked like, because I hadn't seen any pictures of him. George and his wife Parris had just come back from seeing Lord of the Rings the fellowship of the Rings. They said it was "Fantastic!" and they were going to see it again.

Well it just so happened that I had to do a book report in my English class. I had decided to do it. I would ask my teacher if I could do it on A Game of Thrones. She said yes of course. After my teacher said yes I, of course, had to ask George if he would help me out with it and do an interview with me. I couldn't remember where George lived so I had to ask my dad to ask George for me; he did, of course. George said yes to helping me with my report. I was ecstatic! George Martin was really going to help me out, this is great!

The day came when I had to go meet George, and do my interview.

"Why did you decide to make Tyrion who he is?

"Well actually I had a book that I wrote a long time ago called Wind Caver. There was one throw away line in that, where a character refers to a lord of a house. That's the only reference; it's just that one line in the entire book. But that line always stuck with me. That character would be an interesting character to write about to, expand, and when I got in to this book I did it.

Tyrion is my favorite character. At times he just seems to take over the whole show, but I do like them all, even the bad guys. I write from a very internal position on the viewpoint characters in particular, and so you have to really get inside their head and understand the world from the way they see it. I don't think you can do it unless you have a certain sympathy for the character, even if he is a bad guy like Theon. In the second book your inside his head and you understand some of the things he does."

After learning this I started to realize that George depicted himself, in a way, as Tyrion. George is very over-awing and intelligent, as is Tyrion. They are both quick-witted and clever. They both may not be in the best of shape, but who needs muscles when you can out-smart someone almost every time?

"When did you start A Game of Thrones?"

"That's difficult to say. I began it in 1991 I worked on it for just about a month or so. I had written about 75 pages, and an opportunity came up in Hollywood involving a television show. I flew out there pitched and sold this television pilot. I had to put the book aside, so for about two years I worked with this television show; writing scripts for it and so forth. It came to nothing, so it was not until 1993 that I really got to write A Game of Thrones. Not until the end of the year. At that point I showed it to my agent finally and he sold it. I had one foot in Hollywood in through all of this. I had my New York agent who was selling my books, and I had my Hollywood agent representing my movies and films. I still had a couple of projects to do, so even when I sold A Game of Thrones I couldn't work on it full time, because I owed movies to Disney studios and some other people; I had to finish those first and then go back to it. I really didn't finish it until early 1996 it was like 5 years in the writing, but it was not, you know 5 years working on it every day. It was very much going to it then doing something else, then coming back to it, which in a lot of good days would work actually, but I wouldn't do that again."

The two Disney movies that George had worked on were Beauty and the Beast and Alice in Wonderland. The thought of George working on the only animated movie to ever get a Best Picture nomination just blew me away.

"Who is your least favorite character?"

"I really don't have a least favorite character. There are characters that are hard to write about, so I don't think they're bad characters, they're just hard to write about. Tyrion, who I mentioned earlier is easy to write about, but a character like Brann who is 8 years old when the book begins; he is the youngest main character in the book. It's tough to get into a kids head. People sometimes ask me why I didn't include some viewpoint characters from the viewpoint of Rikkonn. I said, "No way am I going to write from the viewpoint of a 4 year old. The way they look at the world would be interesting, but they wouldn't really comprehend some of the stuff that's going on in the world. The other thing that very difficult is the magic. This is a fantasy series and it has some magic in it, but it doesn't have as much in it as most fantasy series do. Magic has to be handled carefully, it's like salt in a stew too much and you can ruin the stew. The chapters that have magical things in it are particularly tuff. Those tend to be concentrated on particular characters; Danney being one and, Brann being the other, so in some ways Brann, although he's a nice character he's probably the hardest one to write about."

I wouldn't want to try and get into a four year olds head either. I have a niece the same age, but still it would be very difficult to do. If you could do it and do it well I would say that you would be a great writer. Already twenty minutes into the interview I sat there awestruck at the things he has lived through.

"How long do you think it took you to develop each character?"

" I don't even know if the process is finished. You have a general idea for a character, but every time you put them in a scene and write more about them you learn more about them as a writer, and, of course, the readers learn more about them. It's almost an organic process with me. I know it's not the case with other writers. Some writers will sit down before they even start their book, and write a whole biography on their character; every important detail, every important part.

After you have completed a Game of Thrones do you think that you could have made the plot better?"

"I am a full time professional writer which means that writing my novels and screen play are my only source of income. That has certain consequences, which sometimes affect the way you do something like this. The series A Song of Ice and Fire is the over all title. It's extremely large. It will eventually be as large as six books. It's epically scale as Lord of the Rings or The Wheel of Time. The best way for me to do that would be to write the first draft of all six books, because as I'm writing book six ideas come to me, possibilities come to me then I can go back and change something in book two or put something in book one. Maybe I put something in book one and it doesn't work out the way I thought it would by the time I get to book six. So now I go back to book one and I change it. Except that's the perfect way to do it in a perfect world. If I didn't have to eat that would take a decade during which I would have no income if I did it that way. So obviously I can't do it that way. I wrote the first book, I polished the first book, I sold the first book, and then I started on the second book. Each book I write, you know, I want to go back to A Game of Thrones and say, "Wow I should I should really change that. I could put this thing here and change that it would come around nicely in book three." So you're limited to a certain extent more than you know. But in large I'm pretty pleased with it. Ideally If I win the New Mexico state lottery then I could finish all of them, and that would be even better.

Before finding this out I though most writers were full time writers. Yes winning the New Mexico state lottery would be great.

"How did you come up for the idea of A Game of Thrones?"

"I really didn't. It was an idea that came to me. I was working in Hollywood at the time, and I had sort of a low where I had nothing going on. I decided I would start a science fiction novel that I had been planning for some time called Avalon. I was about thirty or forty pages into it when one day the idea came to me for the first chapter of A Game of Thrones, not the prologue, which I wrote later, but the first actual chapter where Brann finds the Direwolf pups in the summer snow. It came to me so vividly that I had to write it, so I put the other book aside, and I just sat down and got it down on paper. After that I knew what the second chapter had to be and then what the third had to be, and I could see the whole world flowing from there. I still haven't gone back to it in all the years since. Here I am still working on A Song of Ice and Fire, eleven years later."

I then handed him a list of books that I had a choice to do my book report on instead of A Game of Thrones. Then I asked him if his book, A Game of Thrones should be included in it.

"Well, one of the important things to remember is that A Game of Thrones is only the first installment of this book. This is one story, one epic scale story that will eventually take six volumes. A Game of Thrones is the first of six despite its size. Although some issues are resolved there's really no resolution. The whole book in some sense is the introduction it introduces the seven kingdoms and the major characters. Certainly this is true of the early chapters of the book, were you meet the Starks, and see them in their Winterfell. Then the King arrives, and suddenly you get that rising action where things are plunged into a bit of chaos. Neds invited to be the Hand of the King, and has to decide whether he's going to go south or not, Brann discovers the secret affair between Jaime and Cersie, and is crippled when he is thrown out the window. Then there is the hint that John Arran might have been murdered, so all of this is part of the rising action. I think certainly that you get one of the first major crises in the book. Also when Ned discovers the secret, and at the same time Robert the King, is killed who has been Ned's friend but whom in some sense is his protector, so immediately you have a crises of government. Who is going to take over for the dying King? Is it going to be Joffrey who we now know and Ned knows is not Roberts' son? Is he going to be replaced by his brother? Is peace or war going to break out? That's really the first major crises in the book/series. You get conflicts pretty much the instant the characters step on stage. There is this deep suited conflict between the Starks and the Lanisters. There is conflict between Robert and his wife Cersie. There is a conflict, although more of a controlled conflict between Ned and Catelyne where Ned doesn't really want to take the job as the Hand of the King, and he doesn't want to leave the north. Of course when he gets to the south there's all sorts of conflicts. Every one of the people on the small council has his own agenda where they all play, and manipulate the game of thrones. You win or you die.

"Why did you decide to have so many characters?"

"It was a matter of the conception of the size of the book. This was the first major project that I took on after my years of Hollywood. In Hollywood I was working on a lot of television shows, Beauty and the Beast, The Twilight Zone, and some feature films afterwards. Those are very constricted. For a one-hour television show you have a forty five-page script. You can't go to forty-eight because the story demands it, you have to turn it in at forty-five. The show has to be able to fit an hour. Movies are a little more stretchable, but even so they expect about a hundred and twenty pages. My whole tenure out there was constantly cutting and trimming. Cut a character, cut a line here, and fit it in. Do it very lean do it very economical. I was tired of that after ten years I wanted to spread my wings. I wanted to have a little more room; I wanted to do something that was epic in scale, in every way, with a sessile bead to a mill kind of book. With a cast of thousands, a lot of complexity, a lot of layers, and the plot. A lot of ambiguity, all the things that you can't have in Hollywood.

I never thought that most movies only consisted of a hundred and twenty pages.

"Who do you think to be the most important characters?"

"They're all important. I don't favor them, or I don't think of them in terms of importance. The viewpoint characters in the first book I have Brann, Tyrion, Catlyne, Ned, John Snow, the two girls Arrya, and Sansa. There is the core of the Stark family plus Tyrion to represent the Lanister family. Then I have Danney on the other side of the sea, Daneris Targarian. Whose story runs parallel and some ways doesn't connect to the others, but some day I'll eventually bring those two stories together. In each subsequent volume I drop some of my viewpoint characters and add new ones. Although the same core still dominates, the cast changes somewhat, and I like to do that. In the third volume which you haven't gotten to yet (he refers to me) I have a new viewpoint character. He's been a major character, but now you see things for the first time through his eyes. Which I think changes your perception of things somewhat. I like to play that kind of game, because we all have our own way of looking at the world. Something occurs and tow people witness it. They might have very different versions of what happened, and very different explanations. I like to play with kind of parallax in my fiction, and get different versions of the same thing."

The session coming to an end I thanked George for the time and help he gave me. I wish I had asked more questions, but as George said " That's the perfect way, in a perfect world." As soon as I got to my car I quickly thrust the tape into the tape player and drove home listening to it. Trying to catch something that I missed (which I did) George Martin is one of the best writers I have read, and have met him in person was an even greater privilege. I wish that all people could have the pleasure to meet him.

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