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Originally Posted by DiapDealer
My dislike for GRRM has nothing to do with "grittyness," despair or shades of gray. It's his refusal to "get to the frickin' point already!" that has caused me to wash my hands of him. 
I find the trend of milking genre series' into far more books than they have story for (even by the most lenient of standards) to be vastly more damaging than a little grit and moral ambiguity could ever dream of being.
Someone point me to the new scifi project/consortium that has the one rule of; "No sequels, no prequels, no reusing of worlds/characters." Intended to inspire genre authors to create stories instead of franchises. That, I could throw my support behind.  |
As to why trilogies, etc...
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Why do trilogies become series? Sometimes, it's just audience demand, or the publisher's desire to keep a popular story going. But also, in a lot of these cases, the authors set out to create universes before they start writing the actual books, and they wind up with grand mythical realms. This is likely why these epics lend themselves so well to other mediums like TV, film and videogames – they are immersive, due to the sheer scope of their universes.
George R.R. Martin, for example, reportedly wanted to create a Tolkienesque world before penning A Game of Thrones. He was no doubt busy creating ancient blood feuds, lineages, and mythologies for his great project, all of which had to be touched on in the actual story. Tolkien sat on a perpetually expanding legendarium — poems, fictional languages and beastiaries — for decades, before incorporating middle-earth into a longer narrative. Upon becoming successful, he was therefore able to draw from these many existing middle-earth elements to write LOTR. Frank Herbert's process was similar. He collected and researched Dune's elements for years before publishing the first book. When it took off, the world of Dune already existed; he simply had to direct it into a narrative form.
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My own take: originality is hard. Building a rich, complex original world is REALLY hard. Most writers don't successfully do it even once. Not surprisingly , most writers who do it tend to recycle (er , revisit) their creations rather than imagine new ones.