It's really irritating when you open a book, and 10 pages into it you know that the hero you met on page one or two is gonna come through unscathed, because he's the hero. This is completely unreal, and I don't like it.
You always try to do your own thing. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a book that combines some of the best traits of contemporary fantasy with some of the traits of the historical novel.
One of the big breakthroughs, I think for me, was reading Robert A. Heinlein's four rules of writing, one of which was, 'You must finish what you write.' I never had any problem with the first one, 'You must write' - I was writing since I was a kid. But I never finished what writing.
With a book I am the writer and I am also the director and I'm all of the actors and I'm the special effects guy and the lighting technician: I'm all of that. So if it's good or bad, it's all up to me.
Start with short stories. After all, if you were taking up rock climbing, you wouldn't start with Mount Everest. So if you're starting fantasy, don't start with a nine-book series.
Over the years, more than one reviewer has described my fantasy series, 'A Song of Ice and Fire', as historical fiction about history that never happened, flavoured with a dash of sorcery and spiced with dragons. I take that as a compliment.
I'm a huge fan of Tolkien. I read those books when I was in junior high school and high school, and they had a profound effect on me. I'd read other fantasy before, but none of them that I loved like Tolkien.
I had an encyclopedia with a list of flags in the back, so I would look at all these flags of China and Liberia and England and Denmark and whatever, and I learned all the different flags, and I tried to imagine what it would be like to be voyaging on some of these ships.
If you're going to write about war, which my books are about, wars are nasty things. I think it's sort of a cheap, easy way out to write a war story in which no one ultimately dies.
When I am writing best, I really am lost in my world. I lose track of the outside world. I have a difficult time balancing between my real world and the artificial world.
