George R.R. Martin Asks Stephen King 'How the F**k Do You Write So Fast?!'
George R.R. Martin and Stephen King recently sat down together in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the Kiva Auditorium to have a discussion about various topics. If you're a fan of either of these writers, the hour-long conversation is a must watch. Or you could just skip to the highlight where Martin asks King the question that we’ve all been wondering… “How the fuck to you write so many books so fast!?”
It seems like King releases a book every six months, and it seems crazy that he’s able to write so many of them so quick. Martin jokes, “I think, ‘Oh, I’ve had a really good six months – I’ve written three chapters!’ and you’ve finished three books in that time.”
King has just mastered the art of writing a discipline. He explains that he spends three to four hours a day writing six “fairly clean” pages.
“So if the manuscript is, say, 360 pages long, that’s basically two months’ work – but that’s assuming it goes well.”
King seems to have figured the most productive way to write. As you know, Martin is slowly plugging away at his Game of Thrones books, and it seems like maybe it because he’s just not happy with some of the things he initially puts down on the page. Martin asks King:
“You don’t ever have a day when you sit down there and it’s like constipation – you write a sentence and you hate the sentence, and you check your email and you wonder if you had any talent after all and maybe you should have been a plumber? Don’t you have days like that?”
King said no. He must know exactly what he wants out of his stories when he writes them. You can watch the full conversation between the two authors below.
Via: EW