The Surprising Jobs George R.R. Martin Had Before Writing Fantasy Full Time

Author George R.R. Martin has become a household name thanks to the hugely successful HBO television show Game of Thrones, which was based on his A Song of Fire and Ice series of fantasy novels. The first of those novels released in 1996, but Martin's earliest published stories were penned some 20 years previously. For almost all creatives, the road to commercial success is long and hard, and this is no different in Martin's case, as evidenced by the unusual jobs he took along the way.

Born on September 20, 1948 in Bayonne, New Jersey, Martin's father was a longshoreman at the docks. His mother's family had once been wealthy owners of a construction business, but this had collapsed during the Great Depression. Young Martin's first income from writing came via short horror stories he would sell to neighborhood children.

From Horror Stories to Chess Tournaments

In college, he studied journalism, earning both a B.S. and an M.S. in that subject. A conscientious objector, between 1972 and 1974 Martin worked for VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) for the Cook County Legal Assistance Foundation. Although he never stopped writing, and did sell some short stories during this time, the need for steady income took priority over a career as an author.

In the early ‘70s, America was in the grip of a craze for chess. In 1972, the World Chess Championship in Reykjavík, Iceland, held a special fascination for the country, as America's maverick genius, Bobby Fischer, took on defending champion, Russian Boris Spassky. Fischer's win, which ended decades of Russian dominance in the competition, gave the game an immense boost in popularity in Fischer's native country. Martin was a keen and very knowledgeable chess player and managed to secure a job as a tournament director for the Continental Chess Association.

As Martin explained at the time, "I run chess tournaments on weekends. That’s a fairly good job; it takes the weekends. I make enough money from that to live on, and during the week I’m free to write."

Martin's next career move relied on his education credentials. As the writer recalled on his personal blog: "By 1975, my stint in VISTA was over. So was the chess boom, which meant that tournament directing gig I had counted on to supplement my income had dried up…There was no way I could hope to pay college tuition on my income from short story sales. I had to take a day job…after sending out several hundred queries, I was hired as a journalism instructor by Clarke College, a small Catholic women’s college in Dubuque, Iowa."

Entering the Entertainment Space

Following his teaching days, Martin moved into television, becoming a story editor for the show The Twilight Zone in 1986, before writing and producing for other series made by CBS. The phenomenal success of his 1996 novel A Game of Thrones set him up for a lengthy and lucrative career in full-time writing.

Now, his fans await the release of the next novel in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, The Winds of Winter, which he’s been writing for about 14 years.