Too many characters, too little focus

One of the reasons I've been posting infrequently as of late is my addiction to George Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. I mentioned several posts ago that I'd read the two books, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings. In the five weeks since, I've blown through A Storm of Swords and most of A Feast for Crows (as well as the unrelated Lanark: A Life in Four Books, which I'll discuss in a different post).

Martin's series increased pretty rapidly in pace and scope during its first three volumes. During the fourth, it's lost a great deal of momentum. Martin constructs his sweeping narrative out of a series of third-person-limited chapters, each of which follows one of a rotating cast of characters. He's killed off plenty of characters who've had their own narrative chapters, but as the series has gone on, the list of active characters has grown considerably. A Feast for Crows focuses mostly on characters who initially played minor or tertiary roles in the plot. The series's center of gravity has shifted, and while the reader gets to see much more of Martin's well-developed world, a number of compelling major characters have been out of pocket for the entire book.


In a (nominally) seven-book series like this one, I expect some narrative drift and meandering storylines. Eventually, though, drift becomes a simple lack of focus. You're asking a lot of your readers when you refuse mid-series to advance seemingly vital plot lines for an entire 900-page tome and instead present them with yet another host of new names to become familiar with. Martin's books come out of an epic, encyclopedic fiction tradition, but the 'encyclopedic' aspect starts to overshadow the 'fiction' with A Feast for Crows.

A Song of Ice and Fire was initially planned as a trilogy. I'm starting to think it should have been executed that way, too. Virtually every extended science fiction and fantasy series I've ever read has suffered considerably after the third volume. As here, the problem is usually that the writer is too fond of starting new plotlines and doesn't have the discipline (or skill, in some cases) to resolve old ones. The same issues apply to other storytelling formats--TV series are especially susceptible to this problem in later seasons.

I love sprawling, expansive stories, but I love great endings more. One of the reasons The Wire was so great was because it limited itself to a manageable five seasons, instead of meandering on endlessly like so many other crime dramas. Speculative fiction writers would often do well to learn from its example.