Last week I finished reading A Dance with Dragons, the fifth book in George R.R. Martin’s series, A Song of Ice and Fire. Although there are still two more books on the way at some point, and there is the TV show to keep me company, I feel bereft. After watching the first few seasons of the show and having many people tell me to read the books because they were even better, last spring I picked up the first book, A Game of Thrones. I was hooked immediately. And surprised that I was. While I do enjoy some fantastical TV shows (Buffy the Vampire Slayer being one of my all-time favorites) and I love fiction that dabbles in magical realism (Aimee Bender and Karen Russell, I’m looking at you!), I’ve never been a fantasy reader. If someone had told me that I would become obsessed with a series that included dragons, zombie-like creatures, sorcery, fantastical weather, skin-changers, and the like, I would have told you that you had the wrong gal. If you had told me that at my book-themed wedding, the head table would be based on Westeros or that we would have snuck some ASOIAF references into our vows, I would have laughed long and hard. If you would have told me that I would have spent the better part of a year reading and listening to thousands of pages of a single series, I would have scoffed. But all of these things are true.
So how did he do it? How did Mr. Martin make me fall in love with these books and these characters? The writing itself played a huge part. I admit that I am, for the most part, I am a book snob. I have never read the Harry Potter series, largely because it was so popular and sounded too silly to me. I read the first Twilight book as a joke (although this was before it exploded in popularity, so I didn’t even realize what a turd I had picked up). But the ASOAIF series is just so well-written. The settings are sweeping and mesmerizing, the characters are unique and easy to love (or hate!), the prose is sharp and thoughtful. The plotting is equally awe-inspiring. Hundreds of characters, thousands of years of backstory, intrigue, betrayal, adventure, love–it’s all there. There is so much, and yet it is never enough. I always want more.
I’m reminded of a presentation I saw at a children’s writers conference I went to a year and a half ago. Jay Asher, who wrote the fast-paced YA novel 13 Reasons Why, advised us eager listeners that we should never give the audience a good spot to stop and place a bookmark. You should always have them on the edge of their seats. He illustrated this with a Power Point featuring Grover in one of my favorite children’s books, There’s a Monster at the End of This Book. Grover keeps you in perpetual suspense about this monster and its potential appearance in the tale. Whether or not he ever read this Little Golden Book, George R.R. Martin is the master of this message: don’t put the book down, and yes, there probably is a monster lurking in these pages somewhere.
Reading these books has taught me much about audience and openness. Just because you have a particular type of book you generally read, doesn’t mean something outside of that niche isn’t going to blow you away. Similarly, as a writer, even if you’re writing within a genre, you want to do it in a way that someone who normally doesn’t read your genre could appreciate and even love. In the realm of YA, this makes a lot of sense. We’ve seen many crossover successes–anything from The Hunger Games to The Fault in Our Stars to yes, even Harry Potter. As writers, we have to think about the conventions of YA and then explode them so that anyone outside of that demographic could pick up the book and fall in love with it.
For now, I’ll have to find something else to read to distract me while I wait for The Winds of Winter, the next book in the series. I think I may focus on short fiction for a little while, as I don’t think my heart or my head can take on anything quite so epic at the moment…
See, you kept reading for him, didn’t you?
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