George RR Martin at the Edinburgh International Books Festival

As all of his fans are already aware of, George RR Martin's books are not known for shying away from carnal urges of human nature. However, Martin strictly pointed out that writing his series was "not a democracy" and that his fans would have killed off hated characters much sooner had they been given a vote.

Various questions were asked as Martin addressed an audience at the Edinburgh International book festival on Monday night, but he focused on sharing plenty of insights about his life, writing and inspirations, rather than future plot turns in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. Yes, that also means there are no spoilers ahead.

He said he had been coming to Scotland since 1981, the year he first visited Hadrian's wall, which later inspired the much bigger wall in his novels:

Standing in Hadrian’s Wall on a cold day – not quite cold and grey as this day – I stared off into Scotland, or what was Scotland, and tried to imagine what it was like to be a Roman legionnaire. It was a profound feeling.

He wrote for a long time before A Song of Ice and Fire:

I’m startled to think that at least half my readers think I came out of nothing with A Song of Ice and Fire. I started writing it in 1991, but I wrote my first story in 1971.

People address him as the American Tolkien:

I revere Lord of the Rings, I reread it every few years, it had an enormous effect on me as a kid. In some sense, when I started this saga I was replying to Tolkien, but even more to his modern imitators.

Fans, mostly women, ask him to write gay scenes, because they're absent from the books but present in the show:

I do get letters from fans that want me to present an explicit male sex scene. Most of these letters come from women. I don’t pretend to understand this, I merely read my emails. I’m not going to shy away from doing it if it has to happen, but I don’t think you can just insert things because everyone wants to see them.

He elaborated:

In the books I have a very limited third-person viewpoint. It’s the way I prefer to write fiction, because it’s the way we all see and experience life. I put gay characters in the books but they’re not the viewpoint characters. A TV show doesn’t have that limitation. There are some very terrific scenes, such as Robert and Cersei discussing their marriage, which doesn’t exist in the book.

He's also fond of bastards and such:

A really nasty piece of work can be amusing to write about. But even those characters, I try to give a dimension to. Tywin Lannister doesn’t think he’s evil. He has that infamous exchange: “Explain to me why it is more noble to kill ten thousand men in battle than a dozen at dinner.” In my mind that is a good question and I wanted my readers to think about it. I’m not a writer who has a lot of answers, I am a writer who likes to ask questions. I am attracted to bastards, cripples and broken things as is reflected in the book. Outcasts, second-class citizens for whatever reason. There’s more drama in characters like that, more to struggle with.

Martin's also annoyed by some fans spoiling the story on the Internet:

I struggle with this because I do want to surprise my readers, delight them and take them in directions they didn’t see coming. I hate predictable fiction as a reader. I want to surprise and delight my reader and take the story in directions they didn’t see coming. Some readers in internet boards got the clues. Do I change it? No, I can’t, as I had planted them and it would be a mess.

Even with such success, his worst nightmare is obscurity:

The real test is what books are gonna survive. Tolkien certainly has … Will that be the case with mine? I don’t know, I think that’s every writer’s dream. What you can do is write the best characters you can. I take very well the fact that people argue about my books – a writer’s worst dream is obscurity. I had years of no one coming to my signings.