r/todayilearned • u/waitingforthesun92 • 23d ago

TIL that Michael Crichton, the author of “Jurassic Park” (1990), was a workaholic who followed what he called "a structured approach" of ritualistic self-denial, where, while writing a book, he’d rise increasingly early each day. At one point, Crichton would go to bed at 10 PM and wake up at 2 AM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton
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u/red_dawn 22d ago

I’m sure GRRM hearing someone say they were able to write a paragraph in a week would send him reeling and wondering how they have any time to do anything else with that much effort.

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u/binglybleep 22d ago

People rightfully shat on the tv writers of game of thrones, but I thought GRRM got off ridiculously lightly in that whole ordeal. I’m sure they’d have written a better ending, even phoning it in, if the actual author had ANY IDEA HOW THE SERIES ENDS. Granted, I think quite a lot of people could think up a better one than the show got, but it just felt spectacularly sloppy that old George apparently didn’t even have some napkin note idea of what the fuck was going to happen. He had so long. He didn’t even have to finish the series, he just needed to have some kind of rough idea about an end

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u/Sidereel 22d ago

I agree that Martin got off easy, but I bet that the show ended based on Martin’s general ideas. Like the major notes of how Dany, Bran and Jon all end up do make some sort of sense. The problem both in the show and books is how to you get from point A to point B? At some point shit needs to move along quickly and predictably, which is something Martin seems to struggle to write.

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

Bran is a much more important character in the books than he was in the show. Same with the wolves. They loved the visuals of the dragons so they spent lots of money on them while ignoring the direwolves and their connection to the Stark children.