Intro: Axis Mundi Literari

>When I began, I was planning for a trilogy; three books of about 800 manuscript pages each, I estimated. Had I kept to that, I'd be done by now, with the final book about to come out -- but a story makes its own demands, and this one was simply too big to be contained in three books. Nor have any of the volumes completed to date been as short as 800 pages. Instead they have come in at approximately 1100, 1200, and 1500, respectively.

It is mandatory while reading this post to cue up Max Richter's "The Departure".

A child-like wonder pervades the ASOIAF fandom on how GRRM was able to rapidly finish upwards of 3000 manuscript pages for the first three books of A Song of Ice and Fire. A consequent teenaged disappointment also exists for why A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons failed to match the progress of the first three books and why The Winds of Winter remains forever beyond George's and our grasp.

There are many, many reasons why the first three books came in quick succession. There are myriad reasons why Feast and Dance lagged behind this progress.

But one reason is the leftovers. The leftovers? you ask. Wasn't that a critically acclaimed television show from the 2010s that was ignored due to the perceived failures of Damon Lindeloff's "Lost" and Game of Thrones' dominance of prestige TV in the 2010s?

Yes. And it's also the chapters/pages originally written for one book that ended up shifted to the next book due to a variety of reason. Because you're interested in this topic: it's a major reason why George crushed out a crazy-fast writing process for the first three books and why that process ended up crushing him while writing A Dance with Dragons and ... seems to be a major factor in stopping George from finishing The Winds of Winter.

Two Books and an Idea

There are two outliers to this analysis: A Game of Thrones and A Feast for Crows. For both books, GRRM had nothing leftover from previous volumes as a base to start afresh -- kind-of. I'll cover Feast in the second part of this analysis. But let's dive into the first volume of A Song of Ice and Fire.

George's inspiration for writing A Song of Ice and Fire was him imagining a boy watching an execution or ... Bran Stark's first chapter in A Game of Thrones.

>One day the opening chapter of A GAME OF THRONES came to me, so vividly I =had= to write it. Not the prologue, mind you, but the first chapters proper, where Bran sees the man beheaded and finds the direwolves in the snow.

What ended up having after is that GRRM wrote the first dozen or so chapters of A Game of Thrones. But then he put the book aside when he was hired as a writer for a show known as Doorways.

But when Doorways wasn't picked up for a full season run, GRRM resumed writing A Game of Thrones seemingly in late 1993*.* As his base, he had those dozen or so chapters he had written in 1991/1992 that ended up being the springboard to a very fast writing pace for A Game of Thrones.

(As an aside, and I'm trying to go more survey route than granular: there is a fascinating topic insofar as the November 1994 manuscript partial of A Game of Thrones was 384 manuscript pages. But his submitted next manuscript partial dated to July 1995 came in at 888 pages -- meaning he finalized 504 manuscript pages of the book in about eight months!)

He finished the book in October 1995. In total, the final manuscript for A Game of Thrones came in at 1,088 manuscript pages.

But that was not everything he had written. Not by a long shot. He had different endings, additional material in the can.

And some of the endings of A Game of Thrones became ...

A Solace for Tired Writers (The Start of A CLASH OF KINGS)

Yes. I'm going to keep using episode titles from The Leftovers for new sections. It's a conceit, and I won't stop.

A Game of Thrones was published in August 1996. But before the book was published, George did some personal reflection which led to some realization as he told Amazon in 1999:

>The original plan was for three. When I hit about 1,200 pages of the first book, I was still a long way from where the first book was going to end, according to my original outline. So the first book became two books.

Want to know something interesting? it was more than 1200 pages. Originally, A Game of Thrones was the length of A Storm of Swords and A Dance with Dragons.

>It was quite at the end, it was by '95 that I realized it had to be more than a trilogy because I had 1,500 pages of manuscript [and] I wasn't anywhere close to the end of the first book. So I said, "I know this can't all fit into three here. I'm gonna have to break this first book into two books to get it all done." Which required a certain amount of restructuring, but I went back and I did that, I took out about 300 pages or so, and that became the beginning of the second book. And I moved things around.

So, those 300 pages became the start of A Clash of Kings. And this is really where the leftovers idea comes into clear focus. He wrote too much material for A Game of Thrones. And so the material that he couldn't reasonably fit in the book became the starting point for A Clash of Kings.

And you know what else? That leftover material became the launch pad for another bout of rapid writing.

By mid-June 1997 (About 9 months after the publication of A Game of Thrones), A Clash of Kings was at 567 manuscript pages per u/gsteff. Essentially, 300 pages of leftover material from Game rewritten to be the starting point of Clash along with 267 new manuscript pages of material.

And while I'm not sure there are additional manuscript partials that exist to the public (there probably are), we know that the book was published in November 1998 and came in weighing at 1,184 manuscript pages -- meaning he completed 617 manuscript pages of new material between June 1997 and around Summer 1998 (Assuming his publishers received the manuscript six months out from publication). About a year!

So, let's break it down as ridiculously as we can:

300 pages cut from Game + 267 new pages writen by June 1997 + 617 pages written between June 1997 and let's say June 1998 = 1,184 manuscript pages.

Ah, but wait, was that everything he'd written during that time period? Did he overwrite A Clash of Kings to become ...

George RR Martin at His Best (Or: A STORM OF SWORDS)

Years ago, u/zionius_ was looking at auctioned copies of A Song of Ice and Fire and stumbled on something very interesting. I won't paraphrase him but copy from his post:

>Another interesting thing is the last chapter in the manuscript, Jaime III, has the page header KINGS instead of SWORDS, and a duplicated page number "264" with the previous chapter.

>I think this is how it happened: in 1998 GRRM reached ~1400 pages of manuscripts, he delivered the first 1184 pages, and called it ACOK. Then he pasted the rest pages into a new file, but forgot to change the page header. He printed this new file, which included that Jaime chapter. (The page number 264 suggests it must be a file intended to be the 3rd book, in original ACOK file this chapter's page number would be over 1300.) Sometime later, GRRM changed the header to STORM, and made some edits so original P234 became P235 (probably, adding a cover page saying "ASOS"). He printed it again, and that's the first half of the manuscript. Therefore, we know GRRM finished 278 or so manuscript pages of ASOS before he delivered ACOK. (And perhaps these 16 chapters were all the finished ASOS chapters when ACOK was delivered in 1998.)

This is of interest to us (to me) because it hinted at leftover material GRRM cut from A Clash of Kings to A Storm of Swords: 278 manuscript pages. Of literary interest, it seems that maybe, possibly GRRM intended for Jaime to be a POV character at the end of Clash. But then decided to make him a brand new POV character in Storm.

Pretty good decision! But more importantly, it aids in my thesis. He had close to another 300 manuscript pages as a starting point for A Storm of Swords.

For that matter, those 278 manuscript pages were not everything GRRM had written for Storm before Clash was published. I think it was a fair amount more. The hint here comes from a So Spake Martin from 2001:

>Were circumstances and timing of Tywin's death something you planned for a long time or another case of characters "taking intiative", like with Cat?

>GRRM: That scene was largely written even before A CLASH OF KINGS was published. Hell, I'd been setting up that "Lord Tywin shits gold" line since his very first appearance in A GAME OF THRONES.

There's been some fan debate on whether GRRM was implying that he had written all of Tyrion's material for Storm in the process of writing Clash. My read is that at least Tyrion's final Storm chapter was in draft form by the end of the writing process of Clash. But it was finalized during the process of writing Storm. There was probably more Tyrion material not contained in the 278 manuscript page partial, but that's speculative. And opinions differ.

Regardless, what happened next was an absurd speed of writing by George. Here's GRRM in 2020 recounting his writing pace while writing Storm:

>Way way back in 1999, when I was deep in the writing of A STORM OF SWORDS, I was averaging about 150 pages of manuscript a month. I fear I shall never recapture that pace again. Looking back, I am not sure how I did it then. A fever indeed.

My argument: that absurdity was sourced to having had a lot of material already done. It was a jumping off point to end Act 1 of ASOIAF on a bang.

Conclusion: The Book of George

By the end of writing the first act of ASOIAF, GRRM had written around 3700 manuscript pages over the course of 9-ish years. (But really, in about 8 years given the break between 1992-1993 when he did Doorways). To accomplish this, he overwrote A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings. The overwriting became the start points for Clash and A Storm of Swords respectively.

But at the end of 2000, GRRM seemingly had no new leftover material for his fourth volume: A Dance with Dragons.

(And before you come screaming into the comments to correct my error, know that Dance was the original fourth volume that was later split into Feast and Dance. We'll get to that in part 2).

But He had plenty of ideas. Lots of seeds he planted in the first three books, lots of ideas on how these seeds could grow into a garden. But no pages as far as I know - and please, someone correct me if I'm wrong.

Still, given how fast he wrote the first three books - especially Clash and Storm - he confidently predicted that Dance would be done by 2002.

He couldn't have been more wrong.

For he had no leftovers as a trail starter.

And even when he had tons, and I mean tons, of leftover material when he finally finished volume four, he was betrayed by his leftovers. Betrayed, I tell you.

But that's next time.

Thanks for reading!