George R.R. Martin tracked 8 viewpoint characters in the first book. By the fifth he was tracking 31. The reason book six never ships is hiding in that jump.
Every POV is a piece of state that has to stay consistent: where the character is, what they know, what day it is, who they've crossed paths with. 8 characters give you 28 possible pairings to keep straight. 31 give you 465. The bookkeeping doesn't grow in a line. It grows with the square of the cast.
He hit the wall in 2005. What became A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons was one novel he had to split by geography, Westeros in one volume and Essos in the other, because he could no longer interleave the timelines into a single thread. That's sharding a story because the monolith stopped compiling.
Martin named the worst piece himself: the Meereenese knot. Several characters converging on one city, each arriving at a different time, each chapter depending on the order of the others. He worried at it for six years and finally cut it by adding a new viewpoint to cover the gaps. Untangling it only widened the surface he then had to resolve in the next book.
Now run the other side of the ledger. The show aired its ending in 2019, to a fan revolt. His net worth sits near $120M, with royalties and HBO money landing every year whether or not the book exists. Two spinoffs are filming right now and want his hours. Finishing carries one near-certain outcome: getting measured against a finale fans despised, on plot threads he's publicly said he can't untie. The wait since 2011 has already passed the 15 years it took to write the first five.
The sprawl of viewpoints is what made Westeros feel like a real place with no center. It's also the thing he now has to resolve by hand, at 77, for almost no money he doesn't already have. He calls the book the curse of his life. The curse was the architecture.
Culture Crave 🍿 (@CultureCrave)
The wait for 'The Winds of Winter' has officially surpassed the time it took George R.R. Martin to release the first 5 ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ books 📚
— https://nitter.net/CultureCrave/status/2068665242771423692#m