Getting more from George RR Martin

I first read George RR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire books when I was doing my finals. Ridiculously addictive as they were, I'd force myself to do half-an-hour of revision and then let myself have half-an-hour of reading: it was one of those joyful times, when you discover a new author and find a whole new series of books to mine your way through. I can get quite obsessive about my reading, so the summer of 2001 was a GRRM time for me.

I loved this fantasy world which was so light on magic and so heavy on blood and sex and death, and I was filled with glee to discover that this was one fantasy author who was happy to kill off just about anyone, hero or villain. The world of the Starks (winter, as the Stark motto has it, is coming) was so shiveringly, icily foreboding. "Fear," young boy Brandon Stark is told, "is for the winter, when the snows fall a hundred feet deep and the ice wind comes howling out of the north. Fear is for the long night, when the sun hides its face for years at a time, and little children are born and live and die all in darkness while the dire wolves grow gaunt and hungry, and the white walkers move through the woods." And the world of Daeneryss was so vibrantly, violently colourful.

So yes, I am one of those fans who was desperate for A Feast for Crows to be published, and I'm one of those fans who can't wait for A Dance with Dragons, but unlike some – there is, after all, a world of other reading out there – I've managed to restrain myself from haranguing Martin about getting on with it. Even when I met him last November (with a four-week old baby waiting around the corner with my mum – that's how keen I was), and when I got to talk to him for the interview which was published today.

Space issues in the paper meant that I couldn't cram in everything we chatted about, and so I thought I'd share a few more of his answers here, for anyone who's interested. What, I wanted to know, does he think of A Dance with Dragons, now it's nearly done? Is he happy with it? "I'm so close to it and I've been working on it so long that it's hard to tell," he said. "There are days when I think this is great, this is the best thing I've ever done. And there are days when I think this is hopeless, I need another 10 years, why did I ever do this? Like most writers I'm a mass of insecurities and I reel from one state to the other here. But ultimately the readers and the reviewers and the critics will decide."

And why, Mr Martin, did you decide to split the book in two, leaving your readers on tenterhooks? "I had too much material to fit in one book. I was late, I was late with A Feast for Crows and I was going to be later. I looked at the book and at that stage I had 1,500 pages and yet wasn't anywhere near the end. I was near the end on some characters, but the books have like eight viewpoint characters which I intercut between, so on some characters I'd hardly even started yet. And then it occurred to me, the notion of splitting the book in two came up.

"One way to split it in two was chronologically: OK, I'll do the first six months of the story with all the characters. But I couldn't split it that way because I didn't have even the first six months of the story about all the characters. It did occur to me, I could take the stories which were almost done and split it by character and not by chronology. And once I did that it really fell into two books. When Dance with Dragons comes out it's not what happens after Feast for Crows, it's what happens to other characters during the same period. It's in parallel, not sequentially. Although Dance does go further than Feast. You'll find out what happens to some of the Feast characters after the end of Feast. Dance extends – if you say Feast covers a year, Dance covers a year-and-a-half."

Part of the reason, I think, that the whole Ice and Fire series has become so huge is that Martin isn't the sort to plan out what's coming. "I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners," he said. "The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect."

We also touched on the fan anger. "Whenever I blogged about going on a trip or a vacation or editing an anthology that would always trigger a wave of how dare you do that, finish the book, that's your main obligation. It can get wearying after a while," he said, but he admitted that "to be fair I get a hundred supportive nice letters for every nasty email I get".

"I tell myself, try to keep it in proportion; this is a problem most writers would die to have. I mean the vast majority of writers out there, they finish their books and no one cares whether their book is late or ever comes out at all. And then it comes out and two reviews are published and it sells 12 copies."

Given that he's a blockbuster author these days, with a big television series about to make him even more prominent, it's not surprising that Martin has broken out of the fantasy ghetto in which so many authors of great fantasy novels seem to languish. But he believes, he told me, that the snobbery around fantasy is lifting a bit.

"I think things are changing. They have been changing for a very long time. I'm 62 years old and in my lifetime I've seen a huge change. The prejudice is still there but it's breaking down," he said. "You have writers like Michael Chabon and The Yiddish Policemen's Union. He's a writer who's determined to break down genre barriers. He's done amazing things. The Yiddish Policemen's Union, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – these are literary novels but they also use all the genre elements. He's really reuniting the two [and to an] extent I would hope to do the same thing myself."

Perhaps Chabon was an author I should have picked for the list of my top five fantasy writers I had to come up with: I went with Joe Abercrombie, Kelly Link, Stephen King, Gene Wolfe and Guy Gavriel Kay, but found it very hard to choose ... I'd love to know what your picks would have been, and hope you've enjoyed the extra bits from my interview with GRRM.