I wasnât the anon who asked about Jon and Sansa, but it got me thinking about the original pitch for the novels where GRRM says Jon and Arya would get together. This was back when there was going to be time skip, and we can see Sansaâs storyline is leagues away from her predicted plot. I donât even think there were dragons yet. So how much stock do you think we should put into the original plan when it comes to the themes and ending of the series?
Themes? Not really a pitch letter thing. The plot? None. Itâs a whole different story now. Throw the pitch letter out the window.
When asked about the pitch letter, GRRM said:
âI began writing these books in 1991, and I worked on it in â91. And then I got a TV play, so I put it aside to really work on the âDoorwaysâ TV pilot, and did a TV show in â92-â93. In â94 I returned to it and worked on it. You know, up till then, in my career as a writer, Iâd always written the entire book before I opted for sale. Thatâs unusual. Most writers do chapters and an outline. They write a few chapters, they outline the rest of the book, give that to the publisher and the publisher says âoh okay, Iâll take that.â
"As some of you may have noticed, those who have been paying very, very careful attention, Iâm not good with deadlines. Iâm not good with outlines, either. I always hated outlines. So with Fevre Dream and with Armageddon Rag and with Dying of the Light and all my novels, I wrote the entire book. I didnât do chapters and outline. I sat down, I wrote a whole book, and I sent it to my agent and said âLook, hereâs a whole book, and itâs finished.â That way I ran into no deadline, it was finished before it even went on the market. And it worked well for me. And my initial thought was to do this the same way, but what happened was in 1994, when I returned to it [âŠ] the studios and networks still wanted to work with me, so Iâm getting other offers, like âwe want you to write this movie,â âwe want you to do another TV pilot.â I took a couple of them and was âOh god, I gotta put the book away again.â [âŠ]
So, I said, âlook, if I wanna get back to being a novelist, Iâm gonna have to sell this even though itâs not finished.â So I had my 200 pages of A Game of Thrones at that point, but they wanted an outline. I said 'I donât do outlines. I donât know whatâs gonna happen, I figure it out as I go. And thatâs how I always did it.â No, we had to have an outline. So I wrote two pages, a two-page thing about what I thought would happen. Itâll be a trilogy, itâll be three books, A Game of Thrones, A Dance with Dragons, and The Winds of Winter. Those were the three window titles. Itâll be three books and thisâll happen, and thisâll happen, and thisâll happen. And I was making up shit.
And I had thought that those two pages were long forgotten, because, of course, the books did sell. They sold in the United States and in Great Britain, both. They sold for enough money that I didnât have to take any more Hollywood games. [âŠ] And I started writing the books. And in the process, I pretty much disregarded the outline. The characters took me off in entirely different directions. So, for 20 years I had forgotten that that two-page thing even existed. And then someone in my British publisher, HarperCollins, they got a new office building, brand new offices, and new conference rooms, big conference rooms that they decorated with books and stuff like that. And they named the conference rooms after the writers, so one of the conference rooms, and they put up these plastic display cases, including the outline. They didnât ask my permission, they just put it up. [âŠ] You know, I was pretty pissed that that outline got out there. It should not have happened. Outlines and letters like that are meant only for the eyes of the editor. They shouldnât go on public display.â
[question if he is still going with the 1991 ending]
"Yes, I mean, I did partly joke when I said I donât know where I was going. I know the broad strokes, and Iâve known the broad strokes since 1991. I know whoâs going to be on the Iron Throne. I know whoâs gonna win some of the battles, I know the major characters, whoâs gonna die and how theyâre gonna die, and whoâs gonna get married and all that. The major characters. Of course along the way I made up a lot of minor characters [âŠ] So a lot of the minor characters Iâm still discovering along the way. But the mains-â
[question if he knows Aryaâs and Jonâs fates]
âTyrion, Arya, Jon, Sansa, you know, all of the Stark kids, and the major Lannisters, yeah.â
âBalticon, May 2016
So, yeah, if GRRM doesnât consider the pitch letter to be of value, was âmaking up shitâ when he wrote it, disregarded it when actually writing the novels, and even forgot it existed⊠we should certainly not consider it particularly important. Throw it out the window, yes.
