Whenever an author creates a world in books, film or TV shows, it often inspires fan fiction. However, Game of Thrones author George RR Martin, the man behind A Song of Ice and Fire’s Westeros, has spoken out against the art. The 71-year-old made the comments back in October when he accepted the Carl Sanburg Literary Award in Chicago. He said: “I’m not a fan of fan fiction.”
Spotted by Winter Is Coming, Martin’s first objection was that fan faction isn’t a good medium for those trying to write professionally.
He elaborated: “I don’t think it’s a good way to train to be a professional writer when you’re borrowing everybody else’s world and characters.
“That’s like riding a bike with training wheels.
“And then when I took the training wheels off, I fell over a lot, but at some point you have to take the training wheels off here.”
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The author continued: “You have to invent your own characters, you have to do your own world-building, you can’t just borrow from Gene Roddenberry or George Lucas or me or whoever.”
While his second objection was a legal one, adding: “The other thing is there are all sorts of copyright issues when you’re using other people’s work.
“My understanding of the law is that if I knew about I would have to try to stop it, so just don’t tell me about it and do what you want there.
“It’s not for me. I don’t wanna read it and I would not encourage people to write it.”
He continued: “When I’m driving around, I think about them. And it just fills my life. But for this to happen, Martin has to really go out of his way.
“In order to achieve this almost Zen state of obsession, I have to push away real life.
“There are other writers who write four pages a day, they write in hotels, they write on airplanes, they write everywhere.
“I’ve never been one of those writers. I need to have the whole day just to write, nothing else on my calendar.”
Martin added: “And it’s an odd irony that the very success of Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire — the popularity of these books has made it harder for me to write these books because the number of interruptions and distractions and other things have increased, doubled and tripled and increased tenfold and a hundredfold.
“I’m not writing today. I’m here in Chicago. When I’m back home in Santa Fe, I will be pushing everything and writing, yes.
“And I know some of my readers and fans are very impatient about that.
“They wish I was like the other writers, like Stephen King, who I talked to once on a show we did together about this very thing.”