A few years ago, I went through a period of struggling with my motivation as a writer. When I first started working as a freelance fiction ghostwriter, I had to write because I had to pay the bills. I supported three children alone on my writing income, so our survival depended on me writing a certain number of words every day.
My children eventually, inevitably got older and became more independent. I became more successful and commanded a higher pay rate for my work. I had more free time, and after more than ten years of working full time, it became less important that I write as much every day. I no longer had to do it and my motivation evaporated.
I struggled for several years to find something to motivate me. I got offered a huge publishing contract, but I couldn’t summon the motivation to write my next book. I didn’t have to, so I didn’t. I just kept not doing it and I realized that I was letting myself down.
I discussed the matter with my writing coach and I finally came up with a mental trick that motivated me to keep writing—and not just to keep writing. I doubled my output, finished several unfinished series, and launched several more.
What was this mental hack, you ask? George RR Martin.
George RR Martin represents my poster child of artistic failure. He’s everything I don’t want to be. I look at him and think, “Don’t let this happen to you.”
Just thinking about George RR Martin motivates me to write and write and write some more. His failure is the most motivating thing in my life.
A well-known Youtuber who shall remain nameless critiqued Season 8 of the Game of Thrones TV series. This Youtuber catalogued all the many grievous failures the season committed—failures that led to the series’ ending being such a massive flop.
This Youtuber blamed Martin for the show’s failure because Martin didn’t finish the series of books. Martin continuously promised to finish the series, put it off, and eventually, everyone just gave up on him. Years later, no one expects him to ever finish it and it remains unfinished to this day.
I’ve read Neil Gaiman’s blog post stating that George RR Martin is not the reader’s bitch and I agree with a great many of Gaiman’s points. I agree that a fiction writer as an artist doesn’t owe his audience his next book. Nor does a fiction writer as an artist owe his audience the next book within a certain timeframe.
I also agree with Gaiman that fiction writers need to have a life beyond their computer screens. Fiction writers have as much right to enjoy free time, go on vacation, paint their houses, and even to stop writing entirely if they want to, even if they do so in the middle of a series and leave it unfinished.
There is one point that Gaiman made that I don’t agree with and this strikes at the very heart of the George RR Martin phenomenon.
Gaiman makes the point that a fiction writer isn’t entering into a contract with the reader whereby the writer owes the reader the next book. Purchasing the writer’s book does not entitle the reader to the next book. The money spent on the first book doesn’t affect some kind of business contract between the writer and the reader and the reader has no right to expect the writer to produce the next book.
To a certain extent, Gaiman is right about this, too. Purchasing a book doesn’t entitle the reader to the next book in the series. The writer and the reader have not entered into any such contract and the reader shouldn’t see it that way.
There is one thing that the reader is entitled to, though, and that’s a satisfying ending. There might not be a business contract in place, but there is an artistic contract between the writer and the reader. I’m surprised Neil Gaiman didn’t mention this because it’s something every writer should know.
The very first time a writer puts words on a page, he or she is making a promise to the reader. The writer is saying, in effect, “If you go on this journey with me, I’ll take you somewhere really good, you’ll be entertained (or enlightened), and it will end in a way that is satisfying for you.”
This is the contract the writer is entering into with the reader and it’s a promise the reader expects the writer to fulfill. The writer is asking the reader to make a significant investment of time, attention, and in the case of fiction, emotional investment in the characters.
This is no small investment, especially for a long book or a series of books. The writer gets this investment upfront by promising to deliver the reader a good ending. A writer who fails to deliver on this promise can expect nothing less than to be eviscerated in the comments section and so they should be.
I agree with Gaiman that the writer can stop writing in the middle of the series and say, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” Sure, the fans will be disappointed, but that is the writer’s prerogative. No one is going to hold a gun to their head to make them continue.
It is not acceptable for a writer to promise to finish a book, fail to deliver, promise to finish a book, fail to deliver, promise to finish a book, and fail to deliver again. That is not acceptable. It’s despicable. It’s pathetic.
Even Martin himself has acknowledged this when he said that, if he didn’t finish the next book by a certain date, his fans had the right to lock him up until he did finish it.
Gaiman also acknowledges this in his post by saying that this is the very reason why he doesn’t usually write series. The pressure to finish them is too great. If a story “grows in the telling”, it’s difficult to decide where it should go and where it should end. He doesn’t write series because he understands, at least intuitively, that a series obligates the writer to come up with a coherent logical narrative with a coherent logical ending.
This obligation grows as the series gets longer. The longer the writer puts off the ending, the more obligated he becomes to his reader to make the ending as epic and satisfying as the reader expects.
The reason for this is so basic. It’s because the reader has invested so much already and continues to invest more and more with every book. The reader’s expectations grow with the series until the writer starts to dread letting the reader down.
For this reason, it’s critical that a writer understands the ending before he start writing. If you left New York and wanted to get to LA, you would need to know not only where LA is but the directions to get there.
If you left New York with no idea where LA was or even that LA existed, your journey wouldn’t end well, especially for anyone waiting for you at the other end. This is basic motivation and goal-setting 101.
I’ve read articles that suggest that fans are treating Martin like they’re his customers rather than devotees of an artist, but it’s basic Business 101 that it’s easier to keep an existing customer than it is to get a new one.
These readers purchased a product. They paid money for it. If readers want to purchase the product a second time and the writer tells them to suck eggs, of course the reader isn’t going to be happy. They’re going to call out the writer as a bad businessman and they’re going to look elsewhere. That’s their right as consumers, which is what a writer’s audience is.
I’ve read a lot of articles on why George RR Martin failed to finish the next book in the Song of Fire and Ice series. One reason is that the pressure of delaying for this long has built up so many reader expectations that now he fears he won’t be able to do the book justice.
I’ve also read that he thinks he’s rewriting too much. He takes a scene out, changes his mind, puts it back in, and then changes his mind the other way and takes the scene out again.
This is just plain bad writing. This is why the successful writer creates outlines. If you even have to question whether a scene belongs in the book, it doesn’t. A writer should know ahead of time that every single scene in the book is crucial to the plot. If a writer isn’t sure, he should cut the scene and never look back. Even questioning whether the scene is crucial means it’s superfluous.
This is why we have best practices for writing fiction novels. I’m not like the other girls and boys in that I was a contract writer for ten years before I got published. I had no choice but to outline everything and know exactly what I was going to write before I started writing.
I made this mistake in my career. I started writing without an outline, winged the story, and it turned the series into a nightmare. I found it impossible to finish the series because I didn’t know where it was going or what to write next.
There’s also a little thing we call artistic discipline. Writing is hard work, which is why the best advice is to do it every single day. The writer needs to develop disciplinary practices around their craft so they get a certain amount done. It’s simply too easy not to do it.
Ballet dancers practice every day. World-class musicians practice every day. Athletes have coaches.
Every artist needs discipline, accountability, and direction. The more successful you become, the more crucial it is to have these structures in place. Once an artist becomes as rich as George RR Martin, there’s absolutely no excuse not to have them.
Anyone can hire a writing coach. I have a writing coach. I would not be able to do this job without one. Paying a writing coach is a business expense. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has a trainer. It’s an essential part of his business and his brand.
George RR Martin could have stopped writing a long time ago. He has enough money, but he didn’t do that. His mistake was keeping his fans on the hook for something he was never going to deliver.
No one expects him to deliver now, but it would have been much better if he just came right out and told everyone he wasn’t going to finish the series instead of dragging it out.
His failure keeps me motivated because I would never let that happen. I would never be caught dead letting my readers down like that. My self-respect as an artist depends on delivering what readers want. That’s my obligation to them for reading my work.
This problem has become epidemic in the fiction industry. Nearly every TV show and movie franchise that comes out plans to just keep going indefinitely. No one plans the ending in advance, so the ending always sucks.
The lack of a planned direction and planned ending usually means the series itself sucks, too. Failing to plan means planning to fail. You can see countless examples of this throughout the recent history of popular culture.
Take a look at The Walking Dead. It started out great and then just kept going and going and going and going. The quality of the story writing deteriorated over time until the show became a pathetic, laughable, cringe-worthy shadow of its former self.
The same thing happened with an endless list of series and franchises. A story has to have a beginning, middle, and an end. That’s the definition of a story.
Imagine if you went to the doctor and he said, “We aren’t going to do any testing to find out what’s wrong with you. We’re just going to do whatever and give you a bunch of drugs and perform a bunch of random procedures and see what happens.” We would call that malpractice.
We expect doctors, pilots, plumbers, and every other kind of professional to have a plan based on the known facts and the stated objective the customer wants to achieve.
If a professional deviates from the plan, they better have a damn good reason. Entering into any endeavor without a plan is just unprofessional and it’s doomed to failure.
It’s the same thing with a human life. Life would have no meaning without death. A person’s death wraps up the person’s life and gives the whole life a cohesive, coherent meaning and sense of story. We can understand the total impact of a person’s life, for good or bad, only once it’s over.
If the person was bad during their life, there’s always the chance they could turn good as long as they’re still alive. We just don’t know how it will truly end or what the person’s life will mean until it’s over. The same goes for a work of fiction. We can only understand the total, comprehensive meaning and message of a story in hindsight.
This is the concept behind the “my life flashed before my eyes” legend. It follows that our lives would flash before our eyes the moment before our deaths. That’s the only time when we can fully understand what our lives mean in their entirety. We couldn’t understand our lives fully until that moment because it wasn’t finished yet.
Imagine if a non-fiction writer did this. Imagine if they just started writing with no point to make and no definite conclusion in mind. The book would be a disaster.
Imagine if a non-fiction speaker got up to speak in front of a room full of people with no point to make, no time limit, and no plan ever to end their speech. Imagine if they just got up and started talking and kept on talking endlessly for hours and hours and hours.
We have no trouble seeing how wrong-headed this is when we talk about non-fiction. The same logic applies to fiction. The amazing thing is that no one seems to understand this simple logical process.
George RR Martin worked as a contract writer before he wrote the Song of Ice and Fire series, but he worked as a contract writer in the TV industry. He did not work as a contract writer of novels, which explains why he doesn’t understand the best practices of writing novels. He modeled the story on a TV series with endless episodes and no planned ending.
The deplorable nature of modern fiction stems from stories, series, and franchises trying to live forever. There’s a very simple reason for this. The writer (or producers) want to milk the audience for all their worth. They want to keep the audience on the hook so the producers can get their pound of flesh and make more money.
Anyone who does this is selling out their artistic integrity for money and they should be ashamed of themselves. Any writer who does this is selling their audience down the river for a handful of cash.
This is the mark of a writer or producer who doesn’t give a damn about their audience or their artistic integrity and only cares about making a buck. This is why modern fiction stinks.
Every writer, every TV and film producer—anyone engaged in the business of fiction—owes their audience a satisfying ending and that can only be produced by planning the entire story in advance. If the writer doesn’t do this, the story will be a failure. It’s inevitable and they will have broken their most sacred bond to the audience. These people should not be in the fiction business because they don’t understand the most basic tenets of writing craft. They’re amateurs, or worse, fraudsters who don’t know what they’re doing.
If you’ve read this far, I want to give you my solemn promise as an artist and a professional that I will never let this happen. I give you my word of honor as an artist that I will always finish the series (unless I die in the middle of it) and I will do everything in my power to give you the most satisfying ending possible.
I take the art of writing craft very seriously. It has been my job for over ten years and I treat it as a job now. I finish what I start. I put my professional reputation on the line every time I start writing a book and that is a stake I take very seriously.
It baffles me that other writers don’t take this process seriously. I can’t imagine what might be going through their heads, but they act as though writing fiction is some kind of game.
They seem to think they can start a series, see where it goes, and then, when it all goes wrong or gets too hard, they can just break off and go do something else.
Writing fiction doesn’t work that way. Writing fiction is work. It’s a job. The exciting part happens when you first start a book. About halfway through, maybe even before then, the honeymoon ends and writing a book turns into a chore.
Finishing a novel is like digging a ditch. When you get halfway through it, you only keep going so you can finish it and put it behind you. It ceases to be fun or interesting or exciting. If you’ve written a thorough outline, you already know what’s going to happen so the story no longer holds any surprises for you as the writer.
I finish a book because I made a commitment to my reader. That’s the only reason I finish it. It’s a hard slog through thick, waist-deep mud. It isn’t fun, but that’s what I do as an artist and a professional. I would be ashamed to show my face in public if I didn’t.
I cannot fathom how these people can live with themselves knowing how badly they’re letting their audiences down. Apparently, these people are either too amateur and self-absorbed even to realize how badly they’re letting their audiences down.
These people don’t understand writing craft at all if they don’t understand these most basic principles. It’s obvious from the way these writers behave that most of them have never studied writing craft even once in their lives.
Audiences and readers worldwide need to demand better and stop patronizing artists and producers who do this. This isn’t what the audience pays for. It’s fraudulent and despicable and I would never, ever in a million years do something like this.
Thank you for reading. Please pass this post on so we can improve the fiction industry and make it more enjoyable for everyone. God bless.
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