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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/5158
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

It's not an easy question you pose. For one thing, this problem stumped [George R R Martin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._R._Martin), who should be considered more experienced than most users on this website. For another thing, we do not know all the variables involved that depended on the 5-year gap. I would say that this question is far too complex to handle in this format, and would be better off handled one piece at the time, e.g. "How to solve the dragon's growth", "How to solve the Stark kids' growth", etc.

My take on the 5-year gap is that what GRRM was envisioning was something like the time that passed between episode 3 and 4 in the Star Wars trilogy, when we "begin" by watching Luke grow into his hero role. Well, something like that, anyway. His problem was that his original plans were thwarted by the story growing too much on the way there, to the point where he felt it was no longer feasible with flashbacks and other means of telling a story retrospectively.

I don't think there is a solution. You either have gaps, or you don't. You can allow time to pass by simply not mentioning it. The problems begin when you start thinking, like GRRM did, that you can allow time to pass by adding fluff and new storylines (Brienne, Ser Arys Oakheart, Arianne, Asha Greyjoy, Reek, etc). By fluff I mean things like trying to add complexity and richness by enumerating long lists. For example, trying to illustrate a forest like so:

> There were all kinds of trees: tall ones, thick ones, short ones, wide ones, spruce and pine, deciduous trees and coniferous trees, trees with faces and trees without faces. Even mighty stumps that had once been trees. There were a lot of trees.

Heck, I can't even do it well, but you get the gist I hope. I am particularly un-fond of this writing style, which I consider to be just a lazy brute-force attempt at adding spam in order to simulate some kind of complexity. The human mind does not easily adapt a set of varied information into the concept of complexity. Rather, the mind simulates complexity by being given examples of it:

> From atop the tower, the forest seemed endless, disappearing in the morning fog, stretching out into the white nothingness.

Fluff can also be extending pointless scenes, such as Tyrion signing a bunch of papers, and delineating time by writing "Tyrion signed another paper" from time to time. Or by people shoving through crowds and mentioning people along the way -- for 20 pages straight.

The point is that fluff does not bring the story forward. While reading 200 pages of fluff, time may not have passed at all in another story line. This is also explicitly mentioned as being the case in the prologue to the recent books. So what did he really gain by doing this? In my opinion, nothing at all.

What he has done is add a sort of buffer in the reader's mind, a long stretch of pages that may be interpreted as a long time passing. But in doing so, he has sacrificed a lot of the reader's goodwill and diminished the effective style of writing that permeated his first three books. Go back and reread _A Game of Thrones_, if you haven't done so in a while, and you will be astonished by how quickly so much happens there, compared to later books.

While important information was given along the ~3000 pages that make up _Dance_ and _Feast_, much of it very interesting, actually, the critical failure is that most of the story lines we read are uninteresting. I think GRRM had the right idea from the start, and that a 5-year gap would have been preferable to 5-years worth of fluff.

Also, while a 5-year gap might be hard to bridge, it could/should have been abridged in shorter pieces. He could have made note of things that were to happen in this time span, and strung them together, while making obvious references to time passing. Such as showing the Dragon's growing in size. I think it is important not to become a hostage of your own story line, but always remember to keep things interesting.

For example, while Brienne's story might be interesting on its own merits (her being a possible descendant of Dunk's), writing hundreds of pages of her making a journey were know from the start to be pointless, during which nothing really happens, except at the end, is to annoy the reader, I feel. I feel that the story could have been left with only Jaime's perspective, and been all the better for it: We would follow Jaime's journey towards redemption with some interest, as he is a main character, which Brienne is not.

Original score: 1