Since the events on the Iron Islands were to have an impact in the book and could not be told with existing POV characters, Martin eventually introduced three new viewpoints. Scriptwriting has also taught him the technique of "cutting out the fat and leaving the muscle", which is the final stage of completing a book, a technique that brought the page count in A Dance with Dragons down almost eighty pages.

Unlike Tolkien, who created entire languages, mythologies, and histories for Middle-earth long before writing The Lord of the Rings, Martin usually starts with a rough sketch of an imaginary world that he improvises into a workable fictional setting along the way. During the Guadalajara International Book Fair in Mexico in early December 2016, Martin offered the following hint as to the tone of this book: "There are a lot of dark chapters right now . The Winds of Winter will resolve the cliffhangers from A Dance with Dragons early on and "will open with the two big battles that [the fifth book] was building up to, the battle in the ice and the battle [. R. Martin announces new 'Game of Thrones' prequel short story, 'The Rogue Prince, or, the King's Brother' ".Providing sensory detail for an immersive experience is more important than plot advancement for Martin, [22] who aims to let the readers experience the novels' sex scenes, "whether it's a great transcendent, exciting, mind blowing sex, or whether it's disturbing, twisted, dark sex, or disappointing perfunctory sex.

Two days after the fourth season premiered in April 2014, HBO renewed Game of Thrones for a fifth and sixth season. A Clash of Kings takes the story to the lands Beyond the Wall, although the first five books do not explore "what lies really north . For an American who speaks only English, the history of England proved the easiest source of medieval history for him, giving the series a British rather than a German or Spanish historic flavor. At its point of publication in July 2011, A Dance with Dragons was in its sixth print with more than 650,000 hardbacks in print.R. Martin talks to fans about the making of Game of Thrones and what inspired his best-selling book series". The Eyrie is made of pale stone and primarily decorated with the blue and white colors of House Arryn. Their review for A Dance with Dragons repeated points of criticism for the fourth volume, and said that, although "The new volume has a similar feel to Feast", "Martin keeps it fresh by focusing on popular characters [who were] notably absent from the previous book. Martin attributed the delay mainly to his untangling "the Meereenese knot", which the interviewer understood as "making the chronology and characters mesh up as various threads converged on [Daenerys]".

The Atlantic 's Adam Serwer regarded A Song of Ice and Fire as "more a story of politics than one of heroism, a story about humanity wrestling with its baser obsessions than fulfilling its glorious potential", where the emergent power struggle stems from the feudal system's repression and not from the fight between good and evil. They are also four of the "big six" main characters of the series, according to Martin (the other two being Sansa Stark and Bran Stark). The deaths of supernumerary extras, or of orcs or their equivalents, have no major effect on readers, whereas a friend's death has much more emotional impact. A long prologue was to establish what had happened in the meantime, initially just as one chapter of Aeron Damphair on the Iron Islands at the Kingsmoot.S 16] The composite set (with both exteriors and interiors) consisted of a large section of Castle Black including the courtyard, the ravenry, the mess hall, and the barracks, and used the stone wall of the quarry as the basis for the ice wall that protects Westeros from the dangers that dwell beyond. The storylines are to converge again, but finding the turning point in this complex series has been difficult for Martin and has slowed down his writing. Putting Avalon aside, Martin finished this chapter in a few days and grew certain that it was part of a longer story. Martin moved the unfinished characters' stories set in the east (Essos) and north (Winterfell and the Wall) into the next book, A Dance with Dragons, [47] and left A Feast for Crows to cover the events in King's Landing, the Riverlands, Dorne, and the Iron Islands. Located at the geographical center of the North, it has a cold, subarctic climate with snowy winters and cool summers.