(Spoilers Extended) The Chapter That Took Nearly As Many Years as Bran Is Alive to Write and Its TWOW Sequel
##Intro
Back in 2008, George RR Martin finished a Bran chapter for A Dance with Dragons which took a long time to write:
Well, I finished a chapter of the DANCE this morning. Which ordinarily would not be occasion for comment, but this was a Bran chapter that I've been struggling with for something like six years. Bran has always been the toughest character to write, for a whole bunch of reasons, but this chapter in particular was killing me. - GRRM, notablog, "One More Chapter Done," 3/15/2008
As for why it took six years to write, GRRM said this:
The rough partial that existed around the time I turned in FEAST FOR CROWS certainly was boring, which is why I kept going back and banging my head against it over and over. - GRRM, notablog comment, "One More Chapter Done", 3/16/2008
Because I'm a healthy adult who is not disintegrating due to growing dark fears and anxieties that threaten to drown me in nothingness, these notablog statements have bothered me. And they bother me, because it seems to contradict something GRRM said after he published ADWD in 2012:
“I don't write these characters in the order in which you read them. I tend to stick with one character. So, I may write five or six Daenerys stories and then switch gears and write five or six Tyrion chapters. So as a result I can wind up with thousands of pages of manuscripts in which I haven't yet written anything about Bran -- which was actually the case in that case with A Feast for Crows when I did do the split.” - GRRM, Eastercon Interview by Adam Whitehead, 2012
That seems like a major contradiction that GRRM said it took him six years to write the Bran chapter in 2008 while saying that he hadn't written any manuscript pages for Bran in 2012.
##Meaningless Bullshit About How GRRM Writes ASOIAF
Bottom-Line Up Front: George RR Martin did not lie when he talked about having no manuscript pages written for Bran when he split A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons, but he did tell a particular version of the truth used mostly by writers and editors that is often-confusing to a layperson -- it was confusing to me anyways!
When GRRM talks about having manuscript page counts or chapters, what he's referring to is completed manuscript pages, meaning the manuscript pages and chapters that have been written, edited, rewritten, edited again and polished. He doesn't consider pages or chapters written in partial or draft form as "complete" until they've been finalized. In 2010, GRRM talked about this distinction (after he completing Victarion's "The Iron Suitor" chapter), saying:
The page count I've been giving is finished chapters. Some of them have existed in partial or fragmentary form for months or even years. I don't count fragments or incomplete chapters when doing page counts. - GRRM, notablog comment, "Not Done Yet", 2/16/2010
So, when GRRM said in 2008 that it took him six years to write this Bran chapter and what he said in 2012 about having not not written any Bran material, he made a fine distinction. He had a draft of this Bran chapter as far back as 2002, but the chapter and Bran material within weren't considered "written" until he finished it in 2008. Sound good? Great.
##The Initial Bran AFFC Chapter
A fun mystery is what was in the original Bran chapter from back in the early 2000s -- the version that GRRM said was boring when it was written for AFFC. For a while, I thought this was something that was lost in the ether of drafts that will never be seen, but then I remembered what GRRM said in a now-deleted Observation Deck Interview in 2013:
"You can come back five years later, and [Arya] has had five years of training and all that. Or Bran, who was taken in by the Children of the Forest and the green ceremony, [so you could] come back to him five years later. That’s good. Works for him."
My suspicion is that the original draft of the Bran chapter GRRM finished in 2008 was written way, way back -- before he abandoned the five year gap. And in that original five-year gap version of the Bran chapter, we would have learned that Bran had a green ceremony back in the day.
My theory is that the first draft of the Bran chapter would have involved Bran remembering or having a flashback to the green ceremony that the CoTF performed. Perhaps the memory or flashback would have informed Bran's current status as a greenseer after five years. But then after GRRM abandoned the five-year gap, he decided to feature the green ceremony itself but found it boring or uninteresting. To make it interesting and worth the read, GRRM rewrote the chapter many, many times over to perfect it.
You may be asking: What is the green ceremony? It's probably the thing that Bran experienced in ADWD, Bran III when the CoTF offered him a weirwood paste which tasted suspiciously like Jojen and looked an awful lot like Jojen Reed's blood. Thereafter, Bran experienced visions which went farther back into time. It's a small, short, spooky section of the chapter, but it's not quite the centerpiece of the published version of ADWD, Bran III. Most of that chapter is consumed with a haunting mood, Jojen's growing sadness, Meera's anger at Bran, Bloodraven's training of Bran, the green ceremony and the visions which close out the chapter with Bran tasting blood.
It's a great-ass chapter, showing George doing a great job of writing a creeping dread and horror that Bran only realized in his next chapter.
##Conclusion: TWOW Bullshit About Bran
... Except we don't know if Bran realized the horror of what he experienced in (probably) eating his friend in ADWD, Bran III. There has not been a published Bran chapter since. But that wasn't always the case. By February 2011, GRRM was a mere two months away from finishing ADWD, GRRM mentioned working on Ironborn POVs and then alluded to working on Bran:
Wrestling with a pair of krakens. One almost subdued, t'other still writhing and twisting and slapping me alongside the head with her tenatcles. After them, I've got a wolf to face. - GRRM, notablog, "Snowstorm on Skull Island", 2/15/2011
The "wolf to face" is likely Bran Stark given that George usually referred to Jon Snow as "Snow" and hadn't worked on Arya or Sansa's chapters since 2008/2009. From the Cushing Library Archive, we know that one of the chapters that was originally going to be in ADWD was an additional Bran chapter.
But this chapter never made it in. It was probably either complete or very close to completion to be included among a list of chapters that ended up in ADWD. But GRRM cut it probably to TWOW. As to why ... who can say. Perhaps GRRM felt Bran III from ADWD was a killer ending to Bran's story. Or maybe he felt revelations from a fourth Bran chapter were better retained for TWOW. Who can know but GRRM himsef, and I am not GRRM.
Anyways, just some meaningless bullshit.
Posted Nov 8, 2021, 1:46 PM UTC