New George R. R. Martin interview

The folks at austinchronicles.com have a new interview with GRRM. Here's an extract:

Every once in a while there’s a scene in the show that couldn't have existed because of point-of-view issues in the book. How do you decide what characters get their own points of view in the book, and how do you decide how that changes from book to book?

I've always had the general structure in mind for the series, where I begin with a relatively small number of characters who are mostly together in a single location, Winterfell, at the beginning of the first book, and then as the action grows, more and more people come into it, and more and more places come into it, and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. It's modeled on history: World War I starts in Austria-Hungary, where the Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated, and you only have three people there: the Archduke, his wife, and the guy who kills them. And first Serbia and Austria are arguing with each other, and then Germany gets involved, and then Russia gets involved, and pretty soon armies are on the move. It just gets bigger and bigger. That’s the overall structure I had. I’ve always written from a tight third-person point of view, because I think that's the way we perceive things. None of us are omniscient. We don't know what other people are thinking; we just can see the events around us from our own eyes, and the only thoughts we hear are our own thoughts. But to present a complicated situation, you can't just tell it all from the viewpoint of one person. If you were writing the story of WWI, how do you write the story of WWI from one person? Is there one person who is absolutely central to WWI? No, you need a whole bunch of people. You need someone on the Eastern Front, someone on the Western Front. And you need a common guy to show what life was like in the trenches, and you need, maybe, a pacifist who's opposed to the war, or a communist, and then you need the Tsar or the King of England or the prime minister, you get a wide variety of people. So that was the number of people necessary to tell this story in all of its grandeur.

Follow this link to read the whole interview.