‘Game of Thrones’ author George R.R. Martin talks characters, Jack the Ripper story

If you’re waiting for George R.R. Martin’s next novel in the series that inspired the Emmy-winning show “Game of Thrones,” keep waiting.

Martin did not give a release date for “The Winds of Winter” at a discussion at Northwestern University on Wednesday afternoon, explaining that he’s a “very slow writer.”

“I write at the pace I write, and there we are,” Martin told a group of about 800 students gathered in a campus auditorium.

Martin, a Northwestern alumnus who received the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement alumni award in a private ceremony Wednesday morning, discussed his writing process and the inspiration for his fantasy characters at the hourlong afternoon event. The author also will be honored Saturday at the Northwestern football game against Penn State University.

Martin, 67, said his time studying journalism at Northwestern helped shape his fiction-writing style to a great extent.

“I never used one adjective where four would fit. … Of course, in the subsequent years, the adjectives kept coming back in,” Martin joked.

Martin said he reads about history, interviews friends and turns inward to form the characters in his novels. When asked where the idea for the arrogant Joffrey Baratheon came from, Martin replied, “I knew a lot of (expletives).”

But not all of his stories have been as popular as the books that inspired “Game of Thrones.” Martin acknowledged highs and lows of his career, including a failed 1992 pilot for a science-fiction series called “Doorways” and the 1983 novel “The Armageddon Rag,” which was deemed a commercial failure.

He said he also wrote about 200 pages of a story about tabloid wars in 1890s New York City that heat up when serial killer Jack the Ripper comes to town — but no one wanted it.

“Maybe I’ll get back to it someday. Maybe I won’t,” Martin said.

Martin said he’s found his fame and the attention paid to the TV show to be surreal and that he’s glad he didn’t become famous as a teenager at Northwestern because he has seen what stardom has done to child celebrities such as Justin Bieber and Lindsay Lohan.

“No wonder these people go nuts and start behaving outrageously,” Martin said.

Martin has stayed so true to his roots that he still writes on his beloved DOS machine because he said he hates the features of Microsoft Word (“I don’t want any dancing paperclips”).

He said he often creates the characters and the stories first and then builds the world around them. He confessed to knowing only a few words in the High Valyrian language of “Game of Thrones”; it is linguist David Peterson who developed that dialogue for the show.

Martin said he didn’t expect the show’s seasons to catch up to his novel-writing because he had a 17-year head start. He said he began writing the characters in 1991 and he didn’t start having meetings about creating the show until 2008.

HBO began airing the series in 2011 and is expected to air its sixth season next year. It’s unclear when “The Winds of Winter” will be released in relation to the new season.

And though he didn’t give away any “Game of Thrones” plotlines in the Northwestern discussion, Martin said fans wanting to know how the series will end should “expect something bittersweet.”

tswartz@tribpub.com

Twitter @tracyswartz