Black Cat Weekly #27

SPEAKING WITH GEORGE R.R. MARTIN, an interview by Darrell Schweitzer-2

Q: Aren’t you afraid that years from now you’ll have a long trail of stuff you’d rather forget, the intermediate versions?

Martin: I suppose that’s possible, and to an extent it’s true of every writer. No matter how well he goes about it, even if he revises extensively and spends a year on each story, the fact is that if you’re learning anything from your craft at all you’ll be a better writer ten years from now than you were when you first started, so you’ll be embarrassed by your early work to an extent.

Q: How do you feel about these claims by people like Silverberg and Malzberg that there’s no room in science fiction for a serious writer?

Martin: In a way I’ m not really in a position to judge their claims, because my career is in a much different stage than their careers are. Both of them I think from their comments would like to do a Vonnegut in a way, to transcend science fiction and achieve considerable mainstream financial or critical success. In a way what they’re saying is there’s no room in science fiction for that. They’re saying a writer cannot do that if he’s too closely associated with the science fiction label. And it may or may not be true. It depends a large part on who’s doing it, and just on very mundane things like marketing and how they handle themselves. But certainly my writing is serious and I working science fiction, so there seems to be room for me. Silverberg was a serious writer and for all that he’s quitting, now he was active in it for many years, and he produced many excellent books, and there would continue to be room in science fiction for him if he continued to be active. I’m sure Robert Silverberg could sell any novel he cared to write.

Q: His objection is that they go out of print quickly after he sells them.

Martin: Well, that may be so, and that is unfortunate. As a matter of fact, I wrote a review of Silverberg’s latest thing for the Chicago Sun Times and I lamented the fact that his books do go out of print, but books that go in and out of print are influenced by other factors. I don’t think it’s all quite so simple as he said, because his good books are all out of print that’s a bad sign, that there’s no room for a serious writer in science fiction. I don’t know. I’d have to have more information before I could answer that question, maybe more experience with my own writing career. I want to see the sales figures, how they would look for serious work. But there are many serious writers working in science fiction, Le Guin for one, Gene Wolfe for another, two writers I admire immensely. I think they’re both as good as any mainstream writers and they’re working primarily in science fiction and they appear to be satisfied and having good success. Now that I’ve said that they’ll probably quit next week and make me look like a fool by the time the interview comes out.

Q: It seems that everybody is lusting after critical acclaim from people who are sufficiently bigoted that they won’t read a book if it has the words “science fiction” on it. Is their approval even desirable?

Martin: It’s desirable in a very pragmatic sense. It’s desirable to get any acclaim because eventually that translates into money. Leslie Fiedler tells the story that he was one of the judges for the National Book Award and he wanted Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream considered as best novel and the other judges refused to consider it. They said some year they may have a special science fiction category, but they would not consider science fiction for the novel award. This is one story, and in some ways it says very bad things about the people who give the National Book Award, that they would not even consider the book. On the other hand I would certainly not turn down the National Book Award if it were offered to me. It can do absolutely fantastic things for your career, and I do think it is a meaningful award, and that there are perceptive critics in the mainstream for all that there are also assholes. It’s true of science fiction critics, too.

There are some science fiction critics who are very good and very perceptive, and there are some who are not. We see that within our field. There was Vertex, for example, with its review columns where they would automatically pan any book if it had authors in it that were associated with the so-called New Wave.

Q: Their definition.

Martin: Yes.

Q: Allow me to go out on a limb for a minute. It seems to me that no science fiction writer can be any good unless he has a literary background outside of the field. Otherwise he produces only stale rehashes of other people’s science fiction stories. Now having made this dangerous statement, let me ask you what is your background in writing, who are your influences, and so forth.

Martin: My literary background is actually primarily science fiction, although I have read mainstream and taken Literature courses in college, and I read a fair amount of mainstream. I read much more science fiction than anything else because that’s the field I’m working in, for that pragmatic reason as well as others, I want to keep up with the field I’m working in and see what other people are doing. It’s a valuable source of stimulation. Also, my academic background is in journalism. I have a master’s degree in journalism so I’ve had newspaper experience and things like that, which is kind of a different literary influence than anything else.

That had a profound effect on me, writing in journalism, just in my style. When I started writing in high school and such, I had a tendency to write very heavy, adjective-laden prose, long sentences, heavy description, purple prose. That I think was modified considerably by my journalistic experience where the emphasis is on terseness, tightness, clean copy, maybe too much so. I think that to a degree I’m holding back in the other direction now, but I think it is necessary to admit that the journalism thing was a very valuable training ground for me. The stories I’m doing now are richer in terms of style, and generally more Fitzgerald than Hemingway, let us say. I like Fitzgerald better than Hemingway. I like his style of writing much more.

Q: What exactly do you mean by style? You may have heard Delany’s claim that style and content are inseparable. It seems to me that no two people mean the same thing by style.

Martin: The way a writer handles words. You know, your story, your plot is one thing. Content can be many things. It can be the plot, or your theme, the things you’re trying to say, but I think style is the language that you choose to say it in. It’s the difference between saying you’re up s**t’s creek without a paddle or you’re up the proverbial estuary without the proper means of locomotion. They convey the same message, but stylistically they’re far apart. I think one of science fiction’s primary deficits in the past has been poor style, lack of style. The words were workmanlike. They told the story, and they told what happened in the story, and you got from point A to point B, but when I read a book by Fitzgerald, to name one of my mainstream favorites, I read a section from The Great Gatsby and not only does he convey the thing happening, but the images from it would just be so powerful, because of the choice of language. Are you familiar with Gatsby at all?

Q: Yes.

Martin: Like his description of Gatsby’s parties. You could just describe them by saying there were a bunch of people boozing and bumping into each other, and that’s the stylistic device you chose, and it makes the point, but he describes them as brightly colored moths fluttering together. That’s a beautiful image to me, and it conveys the same information, but much better. Also the language itself is an additional source of pleasure to the reader. I just sat back and said, “That’s lovely.” It sticks in my mind and I remember it. Now that’s one thing that I want to do.

The kind of science fiction I’m interested in writing, the kind I’m doing right now anyway, I think of as rather traditional science fiction. I deal with traditional SF things that are very much within the genre, but I want to add to it style, as good as I can make it, and characterization which is another weakness that science fiction has had.

Q: Don’t you think these are highly related, because it is by the author’s use of language that you can tell one character from the other?

Martin: They are related, but I don’t think that they are necessarily identical. Yeah, a good style will help you in your characterization. It’s good to have command of a good style and you can make it sit up and beg for you, but there are novels that have good characterization and a style that is basically workmanlike. I don’t want to denigrate a workmanlike style. There are places for it and there are stories where you should have it. Style should be an instrument and you should be able to choose what you want.

I went through a period early on where I would see something I admired and I would try to write like that, in the style of a certain author whom I admired in order to get inside his head and if I could do it, master his trick. Like I would write a Lovecraft story. Lovecraft had many flaws as a writer but I also think he did some things extremely well. So I would try to write a Lovecraft story or a Robert E. Howard story, so that I could learn to do the things that they did. And after I thought I had learned that I would go on and do something else. A writer should have command of many different voices, so he can use one that is appropriate to his story.

Q: Do you think that the deliberate writing of pastiches is a worthwhile learning tool for most people?

MARTIN: It can be, but there are dangers to it, and I think you have to know what you are doing, what your intention is. Like my Lovecraft story was very different from all these Lovecraft pastiches that I did. Lovecraft gave me a certain feeling when I was in high school and reading him. He scared the s**t out of me. They were lovely horror stories and they really affected me, and I wanted to write that, so I tried to write stories that gave the same feeling. I looked at some of the things he did to try and get that feeling. But I didn’t go around and borrow all his names and all his characters like some of these other people did. August Derleth did it, and Lin Carter in his pastiches of him-they take everything from Lovecraft except the feeling, which they don’t get. So their stories for me at least just don’t come alive. They’re total failures. I would certainly never make a career out of pastiching another writer. It can be a learning experience, but remember that what you want is not the trappings but the effect.

Q: Have you done any supernatural horror stories professionally?

Martin: I’ve done two professional fantasy stories. One was my second sale. It was a science fiction fantasy story called “Exit to San Breta,” a ghost story but set in the future in a science fictional sort of world where the highways are deserted, and a man encounters a ghost car. The other one was a story called “The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr,” which is a fantasy. It has not yet appeared. Ted White has it scheduled for a forthcoming issue of Fantastic. It’ll probably be in print by the time this interview comes out.

I may do more fantasy. I’m interested in doing more, but there is simply not the market for it that there is for science fiction.

Q: How much of what you write is controlled by what there is a market for?

Martin: I don’t know. To an extent it certainly hinges on it. I write as a communicator. There are things I want to say and I want people to read them, I do not write like some writers who write only for themselves. I do not write only for myself because if I knew there were no magazines and no way I could get my stuff published, I probably would not anymore. I might still daydream. I don’t think I could ever stop that, but I wouldn’t go through all the work of putting it on paper. So the fact that there are markets makes me write, and what they are determines what I am writing. I’m much more likely to express the things I want to say in the kind of story where I can place it and get across to a lot of people. If I haven’t succeeded in communicating and it’s not going to go anywhere, then I have to put it in my drawer, and I’d rather not bother.

Q: Thank you, Mr. Martin.

1 SFWA: the Science Fiction Writers of America—now the Science Fiction and Fanasy Writers of America.

2 El—Elevated train line.