Huge fan of George and he seems like a great guy. His books are some of my favourites, definitely before I read any of Joe Abercrombie's work.
However, no matter how you look at it, ever since he struck sword throne heights of mega-stardom while the first series of Game of Thrones aired, his creativity for the main series has been completely stifened. Dance of Dragons (fifth book in the Song of Ice and Fire series) was published a few months after the first episode aired. Exactly 13 years 3 months and weeks ago (thank my Alexa for working that out).
Okay, yes, Fire and Blood (2018) was also fantastic and I'm so glad it exists…
Anyway, so it got me thinking. Did fame and popularity affect another artist's creativity disastrously?
I've heard of a few examples, like Patrick Rofthuss (Kingkiller Chronicles) and Scott Lynch (Gentleman Bastards). Any more?
Doesn't have to be in regards to writer's block either. Maybe of authors where the fame went completely to their heads?
Edit: So everyone is commenting about George but this post wasn't made to complain about him. I am more interested about stories regarding other authors who have been affected by fame. Surprise me! I was merely using GRRM as an example.
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I don’t think it was fame and popularity. He was a rather successful writer for TV shows before he dipped into writing novels and certainly had SOME level of success there. I think his writing style is VERY dependent on what he thinks his characters would do, and he has edited the previous books from his original vision with that in mind and has written himself into LOTS of corners, as well as giving himself a gnarly case of writer’s block. It happens. I have gotten PLENTY of enjoyment from his books and the TV series to boot, and he owes me nothing…..it was well worth my time and money. I hope he can overcome these issues and complete the series of course, but I’m not going to stress about it, life’s too short to get wrapped up about ONE book series getting stalled.
He was struggling *hard* well before the show. It’s more a symptom of the complexity of what he made than fame fucking him up. Added in to that is his process, which requires a lot of writing that can then easily need to be totally deleted.
No, he was like that before he got famous.
Patrick Rothfuss has talked about his mental health and fame.
Stephen King – fame led to addictions to drugs and alcohol (luckily, he came out other side)
David Foster Wallace – led to suicide
JD Sallinger – led to becoming a recluse and stopping publishing.
I’m sure there is a long list of authors whose fame led to early deaths, addictions, and political imprisonment.
GRRM not writing a book to finish a series is relatively moderate of an problem compared to that.
I don’t know if he was always this way, but Andrzej Sapkowski, the author of the Witcher series of novels was offered a percentage of shares or a lump sum by CD Projekt to adapt his novels into the Witcher games. He ended up taking the lump sum which was worth around $9000 and got super salty when Witcher 3 hit it big because he didn’t expect the games to do well. In fact, he was even offered royalties but refused because he had so little faith in the games.
He later started bad mouthing the games saying things like “they ruined the novels and made people uninterested in them” and eventually sued.
Dmitry Glukhovsky, author of the Metro series (which also was adapted into video games) later commented on it and called Sapkowski arrogant; pointing out that the games would have increased interest in his novels.
Wrapping this all back around, I feel like Sapkowski got more popular because the game adaptations drew more attention to him and his books and he started behaving badly afterwards. If I recall correctly, some people have also said his novels started to dip in quality after the Witcher 3 came out but I haven’t read any of his novels so I don’t actually know. But yeah, increased fame may have effected him both attitude wise and creatively.
Source: [https://www.vg247.com/the-witcher-author-thinks-the-games-have-lost-him-book-sales-metro-2033-author-says-this-is-totally-wrong](https://www.vg247.com/the-witcher-author-thinks-the-games-have-lost-him-book-sales-metro-2033-author-says-this-is-totally-wrong)
Saladin Ahmed won the Hugo for the magnificent Throne of the Crescent Moon, which was supposed to be the first in a trilogy. He won the Hugo and couldn’t write the next. He went back to writing comic books.
The problem, it seems, with GRRM is a problem shared by many writers these days: inability to nail an ending. I think this generally separates the good writers from the greats. For great literature, you want the whole thing to be coherent and held together, with most of the action throughout the story pushing towards and foreshadowing the conclusion. For comparison, consider Shakespeare, an author operating in a similar genre. Shakespeare generally nailed his endings. All of his tragedies have satisfying complete endings. ASOIAF is admittedly much longer and more complex, but that perhaps shows a flaw as a writer, in that starting off plot threads without knowing how to fittingly conclude them is poor writing.
In general, I’m of the school that authors should start with a beginning and end in mind, and then work forwards/backwards to fill out the middle. And then revise the whole thing many many many times to sort out the kinks. Unfortunately the modern trend of sequelitis and shared universes make this impossible, as you end up writing in an open ended way so nothing has to end.
In this sense, I don’t think GRRM has been damaged by fame. In fact I’d say he’s taken it quite well (I’d say fame has much worse effects if the person is young eg the 27 club). More likely GRRM is now filthy rich, he’s bored of the setting, and he’s just not motivated to finish.
As a fan, it grates on me, but as a human being, I understand completely. My guy was 63 when GOT was released and started becoming a critical and financial juggernaut.
Am I sorry he’s become totally distracted and will probably never finish the books? Yes.
Do I understand why an overweight nerdy man in his 60s who suddenly achieved a massive media profile and huge financial rewards late in his career would struggle to keep working when he obviously wants to travel, fulfil some ambitions and have some fun? Also yes.
Hans Christian Anderson?
GRRM is, for all intents and purposes, a success story. I’ve really grown and evolved in my feelings on this over the years, but…you can’t force someone to finish a story, and no one could accuse him of sitting on his hands and doing *nothing*. He does exactly what he wants, for better or for worse. I imagine he’s always done things this way.
His incredibly nerdy books became one of the most important shows in modern media history, before collapsing in on themselves due to an entirely different creative team’s problems with fame and popularity. (Seriously: The worst we can accuse GRRM of is Writing Too Slowly. But D&D, the showrunners? They rushed and cut short a hit series so they could try and make a Star War, and fucked up so badly they lost the gig in the end anyway!)
But then he took what’s essentially a *collection of worldbuilding notes and fanwiki entries* and turned it into a second, smash-hit prequel series, this time with far more creative involvement. He has a cordial relationship with fans, he has his hobbies, he does things for charity, and he continues to contribute to his world in the ways that seem to interest him the most. I feel like this is pretty similar to how we’d see Tolkien conduct himself if he were around today, you know?
So, to answer your question, I think you named my actual answer: **Patrick Rothfuss.** Because…at least GRRM wrote 3 books before his pace slowed down significantly. And GRRM has always been frank and honest about his progress (or lack thereof) when it comes to his work. But Rothfuss? Where do I even *start*?
He followed up a phenomenal and promising first book with a flabby, meandering, and oftentimes embarrassing second book. We joke about his main character **Learning Sexomancy From The Goddess Of Sex So He Can Out-Sex The Sex Ninjas**, but…that’s all shit that literally happens.
He insisted from day one in the text and outside of it that the Kingkiller Chronicle would be a trilogy. Some years after the 2nd book, he clarified that it’s actually “A trilogy setting up the first part of the wider story.” Okay.
His use of charity funds and relationship to his fan community is *incredibly sketchy* at best, and it continues to give me a real sense of a dude languishing in the glory days.
Finally, I think what’s most insulting about Rothfuss is the work he has put out in the meantime. It would be *incredibly* generous to call them novellas, because I know a writing exercise when I see one. It’s the literary equivalent of a filler episode, short stories digging into the backstories of characters we don’t know enough about to love, framed like they’re lovingly-crafted works of fan service. “Finally, I’ll know what Bast and Auri were up to before they met Kvothe!” said *no one but Patrick Rothfuss*.
Say what you will about GRRM, but he got his shit together enough for HBO to bankroll the most expensive show ever made (at that time) behind his work and his brand. And the powers that be were ready to do the exact same for Rothfuss; just a few years ago, people like Lin-Manuel Miranda and Sam Raimi were attached to write original songs and direct episodes, respectively. All of this evaporated because you cannot plan a series around an unfinished trilogy that has essentially positioned its final book as The Thing That Will Make It All Make Sense. A Song of Ice and Fire had a lot more for its showrunners to work with, even when it was just 3 books with 4th on the horizon. Rothfuss’ inability to produce has literally cost him a prestige adaptation. We’re in a Rings of Power and Wheel of Time world now (to say nothing of House of the Dragon), and I don’t know if there’s room for a Kingkiller Chronicle series. Again, I have to imagine this is on Rothfuss.
Maybe it’s just me. But I can see where GRRM struggles; the story he had in his mind has been shared and told, and he seems to be finding joy in charting new paths. The Hedge Knight stories are some of his finest writing, and the most recent one dropped just before A Dance With Dragons. He still knows and loves this world, and seems to be trying to find ways to tell stories that still interest him and let him do his thing.
Meanwhile, I feel like Rothfuss is frozen in place with a classic case of overpromising and underdelivering. We’ve all read a fanfic that promises The Most Epic Conclusion In The History Of Epicness, and then falls flat simply because the author’s skills and imagination cannot bridge that gap. I think Rothfuss was such a good storyteller in that first book that he fooled *himself* into believing he could capture everything he was hinting at. And then when it came time to make the legends real, he realized he was mostly writing horny pulp fantasy about The Coolest Boy Ever.
And again: *That can work.* I’ve read all of the Dresden Files; I’m totally fine with pulpy, one-note fantasy adventures, imperfectly written with passion and energy. But Rothfuss refuses to even commit to that; he’s promised the world, and that’s all he can really do now. Promise, and pray that he’ll figure out how to make those promises a reality.
Patrick Rothfuss.
JK Rowling has gotta be up there
I just wish he’s ditch all this fantasy malarkey and wrote more vampire novels.
I’m convinced JK Rowling’s billionaire status gave her brainworms
I think burnout is inevitable on a project like that. It’s an ever branching tree. The fun of it is creating the exciting new branches, not trying to tie them all back together. I think he would have burnt out on it with or without the fame.
Tom Clancy. He wasn’t writing literature, but his early books were great fun. Red October is a great spy novel.
His later books were godawful and he started putting his name on some total turds written by other authors.
Jack Kerouac.
Bradbury became a paranoid crackpot in his later years and tried to sue Rod Serling (with Bradbury claiming to have invented the concept of a cautionary sci fi anthology, more or less). He was also deathly afraid of cars, planes, and computers, though he requested his ashes be sent to Mars in a Campbell’s soup can. Politically, he went from being investigated by the FBI as a communist sympathizer to declaring Reagan America’s greatest president, Charlton Heston an intellectual, and Bill Clinton a shithead.
Hmm I want to say Stephenie Meyer.
The host was better written than the Twilight Saga but wasn’t a big seller and she never finished writing the rest of the books.
I heard the chemist was alright for her first adult book.
It seems she’s still tied down to Twilight especially by fans. She has said she doesn’t want write another book in Edward’s POV despite many fans begging and demandingly she do so. Yes her writing has grown with Midnight Sun but it would nice for her to write something else.
She received so much hate and backlash for a book that was basically what romance fantasy and booktok is today. She also use to interact with fans a lot but doesn’t do so anymore due to hate comments, etc.
It sucks because apparently she use to be super passionate about writing and all the stories she wanted to share with the world but that doesn’t seem to be the case at the moment.
Even as a person who likes the Twilight Saga as a comfort book and film series, I wish the author would be given the room to grow with her other books. And said books be meet with more interest.
For what it’s worth, Scott Lynch had some more or less valid reasons for not writing, not related to fame or popularity. I feel like lumping him in the same pile as Rofthuss and Martin is unfair in this context.
Neil Gaiman, pivoting his fame into sexual abuse and monumental jackassery.
L. Ron Hubbard inventing a cult.
I get the feeling George Lucas has a complicated perspective on Star Wars and it’s fandom.
I’d like to argue that perhaps Salman Rushdie is one of the better living examples considering the fatwha on him and you know getting stabbed in the eye
Harper Lee published *To Kill a Mockingbird* in 1960 to huge success and acclaim. She never wrote another novel after that. The biographers say she was shy and that the fame her book brought didn’t suit her.
A sequel to *Mockingbird* was published in 2015, a few months before Lee died. It was from a manuscript written in the 1950s, though. That’s a 55 year wait for the sequel, so maybe GRRM isn’t doing that badly. 🙂
L. Frank Baum achieved unprecedented success with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He wrote a sequel at fan and publisher demand, and then kept writing sequel after sequel because they were the only books of his that would sell.
He tried to end the series but had to bring it back because he needed money, and after bringing it back he started recycling his old film scripts and even unpublished, unrelated novels and shoveling them out the door as new books.
He’s a short story writer who took on something too big, and now he’s old. He was fairly well known author for decades before GoT. Obviously not as big as now, but famous in sci-fi and fantasy circles.
Patrick Rothfuss. Dude just straight up stopped writing
Somewhat off topic from books but similar in spirit is that of Notch with Minecraft. Prior to becoming fabulously wealthy Notch seems to have been a pretty fine guy, possibly even a bit progressive, but after becoming famously wealthy, buying a mansion, and shutting himself inside it alone for atleast a year, hes become…. rather bigoted. Apparently he’s become somewhat less vocal about it in recent years, but still has expressed those opinions on the regular.
James Patterson seems to have turned hack.
Norman Mailer left behind a pretty long litany of embarrassing and shameful incidents (wife-beatings, writing and directing a stupid movie where he and Rip Torn actually made each other bleed, pushing for a killer to be pardoned only to have him kill again, getting into a dumb war of words with Tom Wolfe) and terrible personal problems, and most of it seemed to stem from the massive ego he probably gained as a result of becoming a literary star at such a young age; he would have been writing his first–and probably best–novel, “The Naked And The Dead,” in his early 20s, and it’s a pretty stunning achievement for a writer to not only write something like that but to have it published at age 25.
However, much of his legacy stems from being the literary equivalent of a very arrogant, self-absorbed celebrity attention whore, and it’s unlikely to leave as long as people are still reading his work.
Charles Dickens. I’m still waiting for the ending of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Anne Rice & Patricia Cornwell.
Both got to a point where they weren’t being adequately edited. I actually had a friend in the business at the time and he told me that PC pretty much flat out refused to be edited in any meaningful way.
AR used to get into the reviews on Amazon and take people to task if they didn’t like her books.
Most authors should totally avoid watching movies or shows based on their work; it can only be depressing. The transfer to a different medium requires a lot of interpretation and change. If this is done poorly, the author will lament the mess. If it is successful, the author will lament what the book could have been.
There are exceptions to this. I think Michael Crichton worked on some of the screenplays and subsequent movies that have been made of his novels. On the other hand, I understand that a criticism of the first Harry Potter movie was that it tried to follow the book too closely, with the involvement of J K Rowling.
So if George R R Martin watched what became of his writing, it is unlikely to have been a positive experience.
Martin has always been very up-front about the fact he tends to get bored with series over time. It has nothing to do with his fame. He was like that back when hardly anyone knew who he was. So I don’t think your supposition holds.
If I remember correctly, John Green was harassed off social media for a while because people were calling him a pedophile for writing about teenagers
Lynch isn’t in this conversation at all, he has legitimate problems going on. Rothfuss though, fuck that guy.
Patrick Rothfuss
Gail Honeyman.
She wrote “Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine” in 2017, it was her first novel. And it exploded.
Won the Costa award. Reese Witherspoon handpicked it for her bookclub (and if I’m not wrong, it was the first book she chose). It became an instant bestseller. With good reason, I must say. I love it, and it’s my sister’s favourite book. And she’s not much of a reader.
Then she got a deal for her second novel. Not about Eleanor, that story was finished. And then… we don’t know when it will be published. It’s been seven years, and the release date keeps getting postponed, and we don’t know anything about this second book.
I kind of understand her. Success can be a paralyser. After Eleanor, everyone’s expectations are sky high, and even though I truly believe Gail is a beautiful writer, that kind of success is hard to replicate, let alone overtop.
It’s a pity, because it’s possible that we never get to read more books by Gail Honeyman.
Scott Lynch’s mental health took a turn, he didn’t become an asshole or anything.
Jk working comes to mind. She seemed such a great person (although a bit sneaky in my idea as in would say characters are gay like Dumbledore publicly but never specifically wrote it that way in the books) personally I think it was to hook in a wider range of followers. Then she ended up being a massive piece of shit who generally has an over inflated view of her own opinions. She’s a horrible person. Her only book I read outside of Harry Potter was poorly written clearly hated poor people (ironic as she was poor herself before hp found fame) and just had an air of ‘if I stick a load of swear words in it will feel like a book aimed for adults’
I fear we just gave a shitty person a platform and now we find out how truly shitty she is. Which sucks because she created a world that really was rich in its design.
Well Neil Gaiman springs to mind…
I dont think it has as much to do with fame as it does a lack of ability.
He’s great at creating these big worlds with complex narratives but lacks the ability to pull them all together in any way that isnt anticlimactic when compared to the build up.
Fame has just allowed him to do it without any real consequence.
Neal Stephenson. He needs an editor. Once he got successful apparently he started to think his words were precious and couldn’t be cut.
Arthur Conan Doyle hated writing Sherlock Holmes and never expected it to be as successful as it was. He got annoyed when his publishers kept asking him to write more. He eventually got so impatient with the fans standing outside his house at all hours that he decided to kill his protagonist out of spite. He only reluctantly continued the series after public outcry. He never wanted that series to be his legacy.
Truman Capote hit massive success with In Cold Blood, and afterwards just became a fixture of the Upper Class social circles (and got tied up in drinking and drugs). He never finished another novel after that—mostly made a living writing for magazines and talk show appearances. He eventually tanked his social life too when he wrote an expose about the rich women he hung out with.