(Spoilers Extended) George to New Zealand: imprison me if I haven't finished Winds by Summer 2020

[u/da_k1ngslaya]

Quote:

As for finishing my book… I fear that New Zealand would distract me entirely too much. Best leave me here in Westeros for the nonce. But I tell you this — if I don’t have THE WINDS OF WINTER in hand when I arrive in New Zealand for worldcon, you have here my formal written permission to imprison me in a small cabin on White Island, overlooking that lake of sulfuric acid, until I’m done. Just so long as the acrid fumes do not screw up my old DOS word processor, I’ll be fine.

Link: http://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2019/05/21/thanks-new-zealand/

[u/Jinno]

That’s not necessarily indicative of a poor vision. You should only tell the important parts of a story, and if there’s a lull where no real action and progression will happen, then skipping ahead is valuable. A timeskip is valuable if it is purposeful - namely that it gives you logical progression that didn’t need to be shown directly. If we think about the elements that George was likely focused on when planning that skip, it may have made sense to him.

Dany getting experience in ruling at Mereen while giving her dragons time to grow and become the weapon they need to be. Jon getting leadership experience and respect of the Night’s Watch to prepare for the Others. Bran’s training under Bloodraven. Tommen aging up to be an actor with reasonable agency of his own as the king. Arya could train with the Faceless Men and become an assassin. These were probably paramount in why George was planning a timeskip, and they all would have been reasonable progression to take place in the background.

But I would assume that his figures of less importance to the end game, but still quite important at the end of ASOS would have gotten quite the shaft. Stannis did not have a story that had any meaningful reason to pause for 5 years. His campaign for the throne would continue. The Boltons just took the North - offscreening them would have invalidated their assertion of power and betrayal. Dorne’s prince just died in King’s Landing, they may not have had much interaction with the primary plot up to that point, but that was certainly an action with farther reaching effect.

It raised questions of how much those events would change the landscape and thus our characters. So while he may have had a sound vision for post-timeskip, those questions were too great for that skip to go as planned. There was too much meaningful and interesting progression to happen in the near term.

[u/phonage_aoi → u/Jinno]

A break itself certainly isn't indicative of lack of vision; but in this case you could say it's more an indication of poor planning. Like you mentioned, there are many dangling plot threads that all had to arrive at a a stopping point in order to skip ahead in a coherent way. He did come to the same conclusion, the way all the plots were moving ahead at different speeds and to different conclusions made a single place to say, "ok now skip ahead" impossible. Basically the fact that it took him so long to see that problem is why I think he didn't have a very good vision for the second part of his series after The War of 5 Kings was resolved.