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From initially envisioningA Song of Ice and Fireas a trilogy and a potential 5-year time gap betweenA Storm of SwordsandFeast for Crows, some initial concepts for the IP were never realized. Although the latter contributed to the richness of Westeros, both narratively and structurally, George R. R. Martin originally didn’t have any plans regarding a major time jump.
Moreover, it wasn’t until he was way deep into the writing process that Martin finally conceived the idea, which was eventually dropped in favor of a more streamlined approach.
George R. R. Martin conceived the idea for a five-year-jump after three books
WhenGeorge R.R. Martinstarted penning the series in ’91, there was“just supposed to be a passage of time”as the book progressed, and the second chapter would have picked up only a couple of months later.
My original concept back in 1991 was, I would start with these characters as children, and they would get older. If you pick up Arya at eight, the second chapter would be a couple months later, and she would be eight and a half and [then] she’d be nine. [This would happen] all within the space of a book.
However, by the time he was done writing hundreds of pages, which incorporated a lot of“tremendous amount of events”, the story only spanned“over a short time frame.”As a result, after the third book in the series,the authorenvisioned the idea of a 5-year time jump.
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He recalled (viaGizmodo):
So that really took hold of me for the first three books. When it became apparent that that had taken hold of me, I came up with the idea of the five-year gap. ‘Time is not passing here as I want it to pass, so I will jump forward five years in time.’ And I will come back to these characters when they’re a little more grown up. And that is what I tried to do when I started writing Feast for Crows. So [the gap] would have come after A Storm of Swords and before Feast for Crows.
Although this potential jump would have benefited characters like Arya and Bran, George R. R. Martin struggled when it came to implementing the concept to other characters.
The five-year-jump didn’t work for George R. R. Martin
Unlike Arya, who’d have had a tremendous amount of experience in Braavos, when it came to penning the Cersei chapters in King’s Landing, the author struggled to bridge the gap.
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Similar was the case with Jon Snow, as George R. R. Martin feared the five years being anticlimactic would’ve been detrimental to the overall story.
The Jon Snow stuff was even worse, because at the end of Storm he gets elected Lord Commander. I’m picking up there, and writing ‘Well five years ago, I was elected Lord Commander. Nothing much has happened since then, but now things are starting to happen again.’ I finally, after a year, said, ‘I can’t make this work.’
While it’d have been interesting to see how things would’ve turned out had Martin not abandoned the time gap, which he didn’t intend in the first place, the streamlined progression did add to fans’ overall experience.
Game of Thronesis streaming on Max.
Santanu Roy
Senior Writer
Articles Published :2539
Santanu Roy is a Senior Entertainment Writer at FandomWire, majorly focusing on movies, with over 2,000 articles under his belt. He has been pursuing a degree in Animation and possesses a deep love for the medium of animation. Having spent the better part of the last two years pumping out articles for FW, Santanu excels at covering movie analysis and news surrounding Pixar, DCU, DreamWorks, and Batman’s cinematic legacy.With psychological thrillers and intimate slice-of-life dramas ranking among his favorite genres, Santanu is a big admirer of Luca Guadagnino, Shane Black, Park Chan-wook, and Brad Bird.
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George R.R. Martin
