Let's try a different tack here. In theory, you are correct if you assume writing is a mechanical process. If Writer A (let us call him 'Erikson' can write a 380,000-word novel in eight months, then Writer B (let us call him 'Martin' should be able to write a 450,000-word novel in say one year. Since we know Writer A does not do multiple drafts but Writer B does, that means we can even give Writer B the time to completely rewrite the book once more from scratch and also write at half the speed of Writer A and he should still be done in four years tops (not even going into the fact that he had 100,000-odd words written, even if most or all of these were subsequently rewritten, at the start of the process).

Where the problem breaks down is that Martin is, by both his own admission and the reports of his agent and editors, a procrastinating perfectionist, and since the publication of AFFC has the financial freedom to indulge that procrastination. We are not talking about a second drafting pass or even three or four. We are talking about some chapters being rewritten, scrapped and written again a dozen times. We are talking about structural and timeline changes to the book multiple times, each of which required rewriting a large portion of the book. In fact, at various times Martin was months away from completion only to find one or more issues that, when fixed, triggered domino effects requiring the rewriting (and in some cases scrapping) of tens of thousands of words of material.

Essentially, it's the novel as chaos theory. In a more ideal circumstance Martin would have had a detailed outline (something else that a lot of faster writers have but Martin does not) which would have completely negated the whole situation. But he didn't.



C'mon, this is guesswork and mere supposition. Since he says quite clearly that he did not suffer from his illness before that date and all you can produce against that is, "Erm, well, maybe he did and he didn't realise it, or something," I think we have to go with Jordan's own words on this one.

And his pace never slowed to one book every two years. He spent five years writing THE EYE OF THE WORLD and THE GREAT HUNT and was well into THE DRAGON REBORN before TEotW even came out. Publication caught up with him around Books 5-6 because he had a huge amount of lead time, and after that publication time slowed to match his writing time.



Hang on, that explains a lot.

You're going by writing time alone, and are working on the assumption that every one of those words went straight into the book. So ADWD is 450,000 words long (plus maybe another 10-20,000 that have gone into THE WINDS OF WINTER), but every last one of those words has been gone over multiple times.

In discussions with GRRM, he claims that few chapters on the book have not been gone over at least 3 times. A few chapters (particularly those in the Meereenese Knote) have been written and rewritten a dozen times or more over. It doesn't take much mathmatical skill to realise that once you are taking half a million words and replicating that even just once or twice, the amount of work that has gone into the book is monumental (the same is true of Tolkien for that matter; the 400,000 words published in the novel is the product of probably twice that in drafts, false starts and abandoned plotlines, borne out in THE HISTORY OF MIDDLE-EARTH series).

How many words have gone into ADWD to get to the 450,000 in it at the end? GRRM had no idea when I asked him, but it is at least twice that. If it's three or four, then you are talking about a staggering amount of material written in those 5-6 years.



Tolkien had problems in getting to grips with LotR, since he started the book under the impression it was just THE HOBBIT 2. But that really didn't take such a long time. He started writing the book around Christmas 1937 and by 1939 he'd already called it THE LORD OF THE RINGS, decided on the Ring as the major linking item between the two books, Sauron as the villain and conceived the idea of the book as a sequel as much to THE SILMARILLION as THE HOBBIT. And from that point it was still eight years to write the manuscript and another two after that to complete the final manuscript (and then another six until it was in print).

So yes, it was an exceptionally long time.

And of course we could get into THE SILMARILLION. 200,000 words, begun in 1917, published in 1977. Even if we accepted that Tolkien wrote ten words a day, worked seven days a week and writing was his fourth-highest priority, by your logic he was still a lazy-ass loser worthy only of contempt for taking that amount of time to write a book (and dying before he managed it).-