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Do we think George passed 1500 manuscript pages?


Quaithe from Asshai

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52 minutes ago, Dalinar said:

Why? We can only guess in this topic. That is my guess. Can you provide facts, that contradict my guess? Or should we just make optimistic guesses. 

The burden of proof is on the one who lays the claim, however sarcastic and lazy. It is not up to me, or anyone else, to find the facts to fit your narrative. 

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17 minutes ago, Lord Daedrunk said:

The burden of proof is on the one who lays the claim, however sarcastic and lazy. It is not up to me, or anyone else, to find the facts to fit your narrative. 

When the nature of the question is opinion based, the answers given can only be opinion based and can't be stated by facts. Since the author does not give any updates on the progress, there is no fact based answer, only guesses. When my answer does not fit your narrative, I am not responible to make contributions so that your world does not break apart. 

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On 9/25/2020 at 6:37 PM, Nathan Stark said:

It does strain credulity to imagine that George hasn't even surpassed 500 pages after 9 years of working on this book. It has little to do with how optimistic we are being. It's just hard to imagine George putting that little effort in.

Again, I can not state this with facts, but if I were a player,  I would bet that since the show started until it finished he had not written a damn page of ASOIAF. He had a start off of 200 pages or so, and that was the amount in 2019. Since last year and due to him living now "isolated" he may have written 300 pages. Together around 500 pages. I may be a pessimist, but that is my feeling. I would be glad to be wrong though.

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So I decided to do some digging to see if we could find an educated estimate on how many (or how few) pages of Winds George has probably written. Fortunately, there are very smart people in this fandom who are willing to put in way more time and effort than I would like to and have essentially answered this question for us! Honestly, I bet the following has probably already been posted in a thread somewhere here before. Aynway!

Two links coming your way! The first is from this very forum in 2013. @Coren82 did some nice work on finding out the average chapter lengths in each book. 

 

From this we can see that the average pages per chapter has been steadily increasing with each book. We will use this data to estimate about how long each chapter in Winds may average out to. Since AFFC and ADWD were supposed to be one book we can probably safely assume that the average chapter length in Winds will be between 14.5 and 16.4 pages per chapter. Now, how many chapters has George written for Winds? Enter the BFish...

https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/hvtrv8/spoilers_extended_a_list_of_every_confirmed_and/

The BFish does some great detective work. Feel free to skip to the conclusion on his post to get the statistical floor and ceiling of confirmed chapters in Winds. All the work below is obviously taken from him. With these confirmed chapters I do assume that they have been written or are being written/revised.

The minimum number of confirmed chapters in progress is 38.

The number of confirmed completed chapters currently is 30.

So if we take the 14.5 (let's just use the smaller number for this exercise) pages per chapter of ADWD and multiply that by 30 (the confirmed completed chapters) we have about 435 pages. If we use the number of confirmed chapters in progress (38) we have 551 pages. 

So what does this tell us? Well, BFish believes (and I agree) George could be about half way through the book simply based on these 38 confirmed chapters (considering there were 73 chapters in ADWD and 82 in ASOS and we are told this book will be about the size of those two). Now while those numbers only reflect what is confirmed I personally believe that there are many other chapters he has completed or is currently working on that he has dropped zero hints for. George doesn't like updating his followers on his progress so the fact that we have this data surely insists that this isn't the only work he has done. One such as George doesn't pat himself on the back in blog posts every time he completes something. I believe George is probably more than half way done with Winds but as he said in a post a few months ago, there is still a ways to go. 

On 9/25/2020 at 11:37 AM, Nathan Stark said:

It does strain credulity to imagine that George hasn't even surpassed 500 pages after 9 years of working on this book. It has little to do with how optimistic we are being. It's just hard to imagine George putting that little effort in.

Indeed. 

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At this point I think he must have a lot more than 1500 pages, and that's what's problematic : he has to decide what to keep and what to scrap, what to rewrite and what to move to ADOS. We've seen from his recent blog updates that he still writes altogether new chapters, but also "tweaks and revises old ones". I think it means that he has written way too much material for some PoVs, but has only just started writing others. so one hand, he has to make sacrifices for some storylines in order for them to fit in one single book, but on the other hand, he still has a few/many chapters left to write for other storylines (my guess would be Oldtown- Jaime/Brienne - Alayne storylines).

I think George is definitely on a near-final round of editing because he's recently been shifting between no less than 9 different PoVs in less than 4 months (!), and many have nothing to do with each other in terms of storylines, locations, etc... (ex: Melisandre and Tyrion, or Arya/Asha/Areoh), but he still has more material left to write for other PoVs, hence why he still seems to be rewriting/revising Arya chapters after all these years, despite him having sent "all her chapters" to the guy who was in charge of drawing the Braavos map in The Lands of Ice and Fire (My theory is that he is currently working on Jaime/Brienne chapters, which involve LSH and maybe Arya, so he has to revise the early Arya chapters).

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GRRM's publishers have been urging him to split the book already, which suggests it's at least past the length of AGoT/AFFC (~1100 manuscript pages) since that seems to be the lower amount people are willing to accept in the size of an ASoIaF novel.

GRRM's recent notes that "he's trying not to think about" the size of the book suggests he's no longer particularly concerned about 1500 pages as the upper limit and if he goes past that and the publishers need to split the book or come up with another plan, so be it.

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I don't think the pressure for splitting necessarily means that GRRM has publishable amount of MS pages written. It can also be the case that GRRM has barely made any progress with a lot of POVs (if at all) and the publishers just want him to concentrate on the stories of a handful of POVs which progressed enough and can be grouped together. For example Dany and the Essossi POVs might get their own book, or the North might have its own book or the South might have its own book.

For example, if GRRM made significant progress with Dany and the POVs related to her, which amounts to roughly the one third of TWoW, the publishers might want to get it polished and published already.

All in all, I am not optimistic about the amount of GRRM's progress. There is no solid evidence to suggest otherwise and history proves that this take is more likely to be true than the naive scenario that GRRM completed TWoW years ago but scrapped it and started over.

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3 hours ago, Werthead said:

GRRM's publishers have been urging him to split the book already, which suggests it's at least past the length of AGoT/AFFC (~1100 manuscript pages) since that seems to be the lower amount people are willing to accept in the size of an ASoIaF novel.

Unless I'm misremembering that was around the time show was about to come to a close. Back then any kind of book could have pushed the book story forward before the show shaped the things to come.

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

GRRM's recent notes that "he's trying not to think about" the size of the book suggests he's no longer particularly concerned about 1500 pages as the upper limit and if he goes past that and the publishers need to split the book or come up with another plan, so be it.

That might be the case. In light of the fact that George still wants to believe he only needs two more books to bring the story to a close TWoW would have to be a massive book. I don't think that's doable, but the chances to do it would be much higher if the book turned out to be 2,000 manuscript pages or more.

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54 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

Unless I'm misremembering that was around the time show was about to come to a close. Back then any kind of book could have pushed the book story forward before the show shaped the things to come.

That might be the case. In light of the fact that George still wants to believe he only needs two more books to bring the story to a close TWoW would have to be a massive book. I don't think that's doable, but the chances to do it would be much higher if the book turned out to be 2,000 manuscript pages or more.

I think for George's approach, the idea he might require 4 more books to complete the series would mean it is never finished and he just gives up on it.

The idea it's "just" 2 more (given he's already completed 5) is more manageable, even if each of the 2 ends up being gigantic and split into two volumes apiece.

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1 minute ago, Werthead said:

I think for George's approach, the idea he might require 4 more books to complete the series would mean it is never finished and he just gives up on it.

The idea it's "just" 2 more (given he's already completed 5) is more manageable, even if each of the 2 ends up being gigantic and split into two volumes apiece.

Oh, I certainly get the psychological thing behind that. But, I mean, if he wanted to wrap it up, why didn't have he expand the story as he did in AFfC/ADwD. Those two books start a dozen new stories, and finish pretty much none. Of course, that already started to happen with ACoK and, especially, ASoS.

But I honestly doubt George is going to write 3,000+ manuscript pages only to publish TWoW in two 1,000 page volumes. That would be ... a very ugly thing to do for the readers who wait (and die, to a part) while waiting.

Once they have enough pages - perhaps even more than 1,500 pages - and some sort of good break then they should publish the book. And then they would go with a two volume setting of, say, 700 pages each, or something like that.

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8 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

Oh, I certainly get the psychological thing behind that. But, I mean, if he wanted to wrap it up, why didn't have he expand the story as he did in AFfC/ADwD. Those two books start a dozen new stories, and finish pretty much none. Of course, that already started to happen with ACoK and, especially, ASoS.

But I honestly doubt George is going to write 3,000+ manuscript pages only to publish TWoW in two 1,000 page volumes. That would be ... a very ugly thing to do for the readers who wait (and die, to a part) while waiting.

Once they have enough pages - perhaps even more than 1,500 pages - and some sort of good break then they should publish the book. And then they would go with a two volume setting of, say, 700 pages each, or something like that.

The expansion was baked into the story from the start. Aegon and the Golden Company showing up and being important was going to be part of the story from Day One and he wrote with that in mind, and each book layered in more foreshadowing for them showing up. I'm sure if you told him in 2000 after ASoS came out what was going to happen (only two more books in twenty years), he probably would pause and try to course-correct and maybe pull out those elements expanding the story further, but that's hard to do when it's part of your planned storyline.

As for the other part, we know very well that GRRM does not write the books linearly, but by individual character. If he did write the book linearly, "a book" could have likely been published several years ago. As it stands, he might well have Chapters 1, 4, 8-12, 16-37, 42-58 and 63-80 complete, chapters 5-7 only in rough draft and not even written chapters 2 or 3 at all, so nothing can be published until everything can be published. The AFFC/ADWD split was fortuitous because the character arcs GRRM had finished just happened to be in the right geographic area for the incomplete character arcs not to matter for that book (and he seems very keen to never repeat that process again).

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3 minutes ago, Werthead said:

The expansion was baked into the story from the start. Aegon and the Golden Company showing up and being important was going to be part of the story from Day One and he wrote with that in mind, and each book layered in more foreshadowing for them showing up. I'm sure if you told him in 2000 after ASoS came out what was going to happen (only two more books in twenty years), he probably would pause and try to course-correct and maybe pull out those elements expanding the story further, but that's hard to do when it's part of your planned storyline.

Oh, I know that, but there could have been other, more limited way, to tell the stories. Go more by reports, kill more POVs, make fewer travelogue chapters. I mean, the entire Brienne plot of AFfC does add little to nothing to the overall story. Many Arya chapters in ACoK and ASoS could have been cut down in size or cut completely and nothing of that effecting the overall plot complexity.

A tighter focus on what politically mattered would have reduced the sprawling size of the series.

3 minutes ago, Werthead said:

As for the other part, we know very well that GRRM does not write the books linearly, but by individual character. If he did write the book linearly, "a book" could have likely been published several years ago. As it stands, he might well have Chapters 1, 4, 8-12, 16-37, 42-58 and 63-80 complete, chapters 5-7 only in rough draft and not even written chapters 2 or 3 at all, so nothing can be published until everything can be published. The AFFC/ADWD split was fortuitous because the character arcs GRRM had finished just happened to be in the right geographic area for the incomplete character arcs not to matter for that book (and he seems very keen to never repeat that process again).

Yes, I know that, and there is something to that, but considering that POVs are not treated equally I think the potential to wrap things at a convenient point are always there. If he is stuck on multiple fronts while having a real run with other POVs ... then, yes, such a dilemma is likely. Let's just hope he is not bogged down with that stuff.

And I don't think this kind of thing is all that likely with POVs hooking up now. I don't think George is going to write lots of chapters about POVS X, Y, Z together before getting X, Y, and Z together for the hookup. He does not write the books in chronological order, but he writes the POV chapters in chronological order - for the most part, at least. Some times chapters are moved around or added.

He did jump ahead the Red Wedding when writing ASoS, but in ADwD he only got to his Meereenese Knot when the early Dany chapters were written, he did not jump to that problem before writing the early chapters (at least in drafts).

And the groups of POVs being together at the start of the novel is pretty big: Theon/Asha, Jon/Melisandre (if Jon returns as a POV), Arianne/Jon will soon be together, Tyrion/Barristan/Victarion, Jaime/Brienne. And Dany should also eventually gravitate towards the Meereen gang, Sam and Aeron might hook up if Aeron survives, Cersei might end up with Jon/Arianne, and Sansa might, too, if they go to KL (if they were go to North Sansa would eventually hoop up with Melisandre/Jon and/or Davos - who should also eventually return to Mel/Jon).

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18 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

Yes, I know that, and there is something to that, but considering that POVs are not treated equally I think the potential to wrap things at a convenient point are always there. If he is stuck on multiple fronts while having a real run with other POVs ... then, yes, such a dilemma is likely. Let's just hope he is not bogged down with that stuff.

I think that's likely part of the problem. POVs are converging into single areas and single storylines and so he needs to orchestrate and time POV arcs and storylines so they converge in a manner that he never needed to worry about when everyone was off doing things separately.

In that way, the Meereenese Knot wasn't a problem in itself, but the symptom of a larger problem that will start affecting more and more characters and storylines (so there may now also be a Winterfell knot, an Oldtown knot etc).

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2 hours ago, Bael's Bastard said:

IMO the idea he hasn't written much is nuts. I think at this point he probably has too much overall written, but maybe not enough written for some key characters, and not enough tied or joined up.

I'm not saying he wouldn't have written much, I expect him to have written a lot of material which was discarded along the way or went through a series of rewrites so that little of the original prose is left.

The idea that he has made massive progress with certain POVs so that he has way over 1,500 or 2,000 manuscript pages while still lagging behind with certain key POVs doesn't really convince me.

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

I think that's likely part of the problem. POVs are converging into single areas and single storylines and so he needs to orchestrate and time POV arcs and storylines so they converge in a manner that he never needed to worry about when everyone was off doing things separately.

In that way, the Meereenese Knot wasn't a problem in itself, but the symptom of a larger problem that will start affecting more and more characters and storylines (so there may now also be a Winterfell knot, an Oldtown knot etc).

Sure, but you have to keep in mind that with TWoW being conceived as a 1,000 page book, and the number of POVs we reached so far, there is really not that much room to race ahead. If we get more than 1-2 chapters for each POV and every POV shows up in the books as is planned, then we should not get all that many POVs who have more than five chapters in total in a 1,000 pages TWoW. The lucky ones might get six or seven or perhaps eight.

I don't think George would sit down and race ahead for any character in completely unchartered territory even if he has a run aside from, perhaps, Daenerys up until the point her story is converge with Tyrion's and the other Meereen gang. Arya may be another one of those since she might still spend quite some time in Braavos, just as Davos might not get off Skagos in TWoW.

But with all the other POVs there would be a lot of knots to be dealt with, and that would imply that very few plot lines - if any - get ahead of the others.

Instead we would expect a lot of rewriting of the same material to take place, George using different POVs to tell the same story, trying different points in times for meetings and hook-ups and escalations, etc.

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On 11/23/2020 at 7:31 PM, Bael's Bastard said:

IMO the idea he hasn't written much is nuts. I think at this point he probably has too much overall written, but maybe not enough written for some key characters, and not enough tied or joined up.

We know that he rewrites a lot, so that could be the issue as well.

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https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2018/04/25/fire-blood-on-the-way/

Quote

Stefan

April 30, 2018 at 7:03 am

Hi George,

Regarding TWOW, there is one thing I’m extremely curious about. Going back to your New Year’s post over two years ago, you explained how you for the better part of the year had thought it would be possible to release the book before the upcoming GoT season. Perhaps that was unrealistic to begin with, but it must have meant that you weren’t TOO far away from finishing the book. Since then, 2+ years. What happened?

Did you need to do a lot of re-writing?
Did you stop working on the book more or less completely in favor of other projects?
Have you started working on A Dream of Spring?

grrm

April 30, 2018 at 9:02 pm

I have done some rewriting, yes. But there have been distractions as well.

No, I have not started working on A DREAM OF SPRING.

"Some rewriting" does not sound like GRRM had written thousands of MS pages only to discard them and start over as some would have us believe. Not to mention, he also complained about his "moose" not being productive. (The frustrations I feel are aimed mostly at myself and that stubborn, contrary, balky ‘moose’ (muse) of mine.)

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