I managed to overlook Shawn Speakman's article on Suvudu.com defending George R. R. Martin and the ongoing siege fans of his A Song of Ice and Fire series are waging against him. 

Shawn's article is thorough and well thought out, allowing a measure of criticism for Martin's "unprofessional" behavior while generally defending his writing style and the long process of completing a beloved series.

Shawn was the first person I've heard describe Martin's problem as unprofessionalism.  It really does encapsulate it well: if Martin is truly guilty of anything, he's guilty of setting unrealistic goals and putting them in writing -- of making promises he should have known he couldn't keep.  That aside, you can't really fault a writer for the way his own process works.  Shawn makes a good argument that that is truly the heart of the issue: the combination of Martin's free-writing style and his strict editor's eye makes for a long writing process, and one that is frequently subject to drastic change:

George is, from what I understand, a Freewriter.

So, what does that mean? Well, it means George does not plan in advance what he writes. As a result, George will often write several chapters, which takes up several weeks, decide on a different and better course of direction, and have to erase those chapters--and quite possibly several others that came before them. Those weeks are gone with no output to show for it other than having a better sense of where he is going. According to him, that very thing has happened several times over the course of the last few years, delaying A Feast For Crows and now A Dance With Dragons. Unlike King, who sometimes has lackluster endings to his novels due to, in my opinion, lack of planning, George is an editor who will not publish something unless it is done right. The manner in which George writes can be volatile to the reader who believes George just needs to spend a certain amount of time at the keyboard to produce a manuscript.

But writing for George is not a science. He is a Freewriter. To try to make him other than that is folly--and disrespects the earlier work that has given such joy.

Shawn also brought up the subject of what he calls "the creative wall," a realism of the writing life that many writers have described in many different ways:

Every writer I have spoken to comes to a point in their creative day where, no matter how much they wish differently, the written word just does not happen the way it should. The writing becomes stagnant; it becomes useless and is simply not good enough to be published. No matter if the writer sits and tries to hammer their way through, nothing changes. To sit at the keyboard during that time is a waste of time.

I call it the Creative Wall.

All writers come to that Wall during their writing day, at least all writers I know. The average amount of time differs between writers. For instance, Terry Brooks spends between five or six hours a day before he is simply burnt out. Steven Erikson, on the other hand, doesn't come to his Creative Wall until seven or eight hours have passed. For me, it is four or five hours. Every writer is different; every writer deals with it.

George comes to a Wall during his writing day too.

Hemingway described the experience, and how he dealt with it, in A Moveable Feast: "I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it."  He often advised writers to stop consciously short of that Wall, saying that it was best to stop when you were still going good, to leave on a high note, essentially, while you still knew what was going to happen next.  By so doing, one could begin the next day of writing that much more easily, having saved a bit of starter material.

But I digress.

Suffice it to say that Shawn's post is a worthwhile read for any Martin fan disgruntled over the long-delayed publication of A Dance with Dragons, and The Accidental Bard wholeheartedly joins him in his Defense.

As any good reader of the genre knows, George R. R. Martin is one of the biggest names in fantasy.  His A Song of Ice and Fire series has pretty much set the standard for mature, well-written epic fantasy in recent years.  The first three books in the series, A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords, respectively, were published precisely two years apart starting in 1996.  Following the 2000 publication of Swords, however, everything slowed down.  The fourth volume, A Feast for Crows, did not appear until 2005.  Now, in 2008, the prospective publication date of A Dance with Dragons, the series' fifth book, remains tentative at best.  So the question remains: what happened to Dragons and, perhaps more importantly, what is going on with Martin's writing process?  More after the break.