Sometimes, truth really is stranger than fiction. Two of America's most popular and influential novelists shook up the literary world as we know it... despite taking polar opposite approaches to their respective works. Any avid fan can tell you how legendary writer Stephen King single-handedly changed the face of horror by delivering multiple classics over the decades, while George RR. However, for better or worse, the similarities between the pair stop.

Once you compare the vast differences between King's and Martin's writing pace, that's where things start to get downright crazy. King famously published over 65 fantasy novels and over 200 short stories during his careermany of which have been adapted into films and series (though, to be fair, not all of consistent quality). Martin, meanwhile, has a much more modest body of work backed by his defining series A Song of Ice and Fire, which in turn inspired the juggernaut known as HBO's Game of Thrones. Ask any jaded book reader, though, and you'll never hear the end of it when it comes down to it Martin's infamous struggle to finish his beloved franchise. One writer keeps his publishers very happy (and rich) several times a year, while the other submitted a draft of his highly anticipated sequel during 13 years - Seriously, you can't make this stuff up.

So maybe it was only a matter of time before the two colleagues crossed paths and sat down for a longer chat. It finally happened in 2016 with long interview (via Entertainment Weekly) took place near Martin's longtime residence in New Mexico. Of the many wide-ranging topics they touched on, the idea of ​​writer's block came up near the end of their conversation ... and King dropped some seriously sage advice for our patron saint of procrastination.

Dragon-sized problems require dragon-sized solutions, and no one in the literary industry could be better suited to the task of bringing George RR. Martin from his creative weakness than Stephen King, who certainly knows his way around quality TV shows. To celebrate the release of King's new novel, The End of Sight, the two authors engaged in a long-awaited discussion about just about anything that came to mind—from politics to gun control to, of course, the pressures of writing while staring down. barrel of one of the most famous rocks to date.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_PBqSPNTfg

About 50 minutes into their hour-long conversation, King asked if Martin had any questions he'd always wanted to ask, to which the latter responded with his typically deadpan sense of humor: "Yeah, there's something I want to ask you: How do you write so much books so fast? After recovering from their shared fits of laughter, King went on to give a thoughtful and insightful explanation of his typical writing process:

"The way I work, I try to go out there and try to get six pages a day (...) When I work, I work every day - three, four hours. And I'm trying to get those six pages and I'm trying to make them pretty clean.

In other words, here's an inspiring lesson for all would-be writers among us that's as simple as it is effective: Just keep writing!

Of course, Stephen King's famous interlocutor simply had to respond to George RR's vintage fashion. The author does not hide that his writing process is relatively more laborious than that. In a previous blog post, Martin once compared himself to a "gardener" who plants narrative seeds as he goes along, as opposed to an "architect" who plans every story beat from the beginning before following those plans to the letter. That inevitably means there will be those bad days when he ends up in a creative dead end and has to scrap several pages' worth of manuscripts that no longer fit, or he encounters the relaxing problem of simply struggling to put the words together at all.

So when confronted with King's words of wisdom, it should have surprised no one that he countered with another amazing question:

"And you really visit six pages a day?" You never have a day where you sit there and it's like constipated? And you write a sentence and you hate the sentence? And you check your email and wonder if you ever had some talent after all, and maybe you should have been a plumber (laughs) - don't you have days like that?

Acknowledging that life can always get in the way of the writing process, King remained determined that six pages a day should be the goal. Of course, that will be cold comfort to fans who have been waiting for another one eight years since this event for Martin to finish his next book, The Winds of Winter... but King had some amusing choice words for them, too: "People are calling you and saying, 'We want the next book, we want the next book now.' They're like babies." Cruel? Perhaps, but King's point was that no one can ever understand the pressure of quality writing under such circumstances. Who knows if Martin will finally complete his career-defining work? However, one thing is certain: it will be on his terms (and at his pace), not ours.