“The climb was something out of a nightmare.”

Here, George R R Martin slips Sansa’s voice and colloquialisms into the narration about Sansa. As a reader, it’s easy for me to imagine that Sansa, with her sheltered life, would only have ever seen a climb like this in her nightmares. Perhaps she has nothing else to compare it to. You can see how it leaves room for a poetic interpretation about who Sansa is. Martin could have simply described a steep mountain with a dark hellscape around it, but he chose to use the character’s perspective instead. Whereas, by contrast, Brandon Sanderson narrative voice is almost completely devoid of subjectivity - it almost makes the narrator disappear, since the style is so quiet and graceful. He uses visuals or action rather than figure of speech or other point-of-view descriptions, even when describing emotion:

“He threw off his blanket and strode through the room full of blanketed lumps. He didn’t feel excited, but he did feel resolute. Determined to fight again.”

It kind of defeats the purpose of the medium…! Everything in this passage can be conveyed by watching someone move across a room and change their facial expression. Why not have it be a movie or a graphic novel if it’s not going to take full advantage of using language to tell the story?

(You can make the argument that most of these characters can’t read, and so using simple vocabulary and matter-of-fact language is an elegant way of working the character’s voice into the descriptions of their action and perspective. But then again, this is true of Martin’s mostly illiterate world of characters and he still manages to keep the 3rd voice highly styled to each of them.)

It’s important to maintain the craft of doing so much with so little - telling a story from multiple perspectives with only language instead of sound and actors. Martin does it well. Being able to switch between a narrator voice and a character voice in writing requires careful nuance in order to feel like we, as readers, understand and empathize with the character, because like the 3rd voice, we are just another observer. When it’s done right, we get to pretend we perfectly understand someone else’s perspective from within someone else’s mind, and that is a fascinating (and sometimes helpful) experience. Of course, there’s many ways to do this, so I’m looking forward to finishing The Stormlight Archive (Sanderson) to see how his style develops. I’m so used to Martin’s style there could be other writing mechanisms Sanderson uses that I haven’t picked up on.

Maybe we could have world peace if we could all achieve George R R Martin’s level of insight in real life. We could recognize and remove our biases that cloud an incomplete view of the world long enough to see reason, and put the perspectives of others toward collective problem solving. I strongly believe that artful writing like his makes the world not only look better, but function better.

PS this is just a really long way to say “the book is better than the show”! :P