Now, the world Martin's crafting is massive, and he has hundreds of moving parts, countless five-page descriptions of meals eaten by quaternary characters, and Daenerys' explosive diarrhea to pack into his narrative. But he's being held up by a more technical problem, too. See if you can spot it!

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That's a picture of Martin working with a little program called WordStar. Never heard of it? Why, it was among the hottest software that DOS had to offer! Featuring an eye-numbing interface and absolutely none of the features of any modern word processor, writing a 422,000-word novel in it is like building a new shed entirely out of toothpicks scavenged from restaurants.

Now, before you go calling Martin a Luddite, keep in mind that he has kept updated ... all the way to 1987's WordStar 4.0. He also never had to deal with Windows 8, so maybe we're the real idiots here. Martin says he just hates how modern word processors insist on automatically capitalizing words and underlining every perceived mistake -- which, when half your vocabulary is made-up words like "Essos," "Targaryen," and "Sam," is an understandable annoyance ... and one that could absolutely be turned off in about five seconds.

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Keep in mind that an old word processor means an old computer, so for all we know, he finished Winds Of Winter in 2015 and is still trying to transfer it to 47 floppy disks. But the bigger problem is that Martin only types with one finger at a time, like your grandpa who tried to say that he liked your new Facebook profile photo, but somehow ended up buying 47 Malaysian bootlegs of Pitch Perfect instead. That means Martin types closer to 7 WPM than 70. So, uh ... maybe get a library card and check out some other books while you wait. It's gonna be a bit.

There wasn't any fundamental problem. He wasn't an alcoholic or a tortured genius plagued by demons. Adams simply disliked spending time alone, and really, really liked procrastinating. Every student who's been assigned an essay about "what freedom means to you" can relate, but students don't have an entire franchise reliant on what's coming out of their brains. Deadlines rapidly faded into the mists of time, so Adams' publishers had to resort to some extreme solutions to get the words (and the money they would generate) out of him.

One of his publishers, Sue Freestone, started squatting in Adams's house to "bully" him into writing, presumably by accusing him of not being a nerd and threatening to fix his wedgie. Treating Adams like a child who needed to do his homework was apparently the go-to strategy, as another former publisher, Sonny Mehta, once locked him in a hotel suite for two weeks. According to legend, the phone was removed and he was only allowed out of the room for walks. Supervised walks, lest he bolted like a misbehaving puppy.

via cultofmac.com

As for what Adams thought of essentially being held against his will? He tacitly approved, stating, "It was simple. I sat at the desk and typed and Sonny sat in an armchair and glowered." So either he recognized the dumb necessity of it, or he was deep in the throes of Stockholm Syndrome.

Joyce underwent at least 10 operations to improve his eyesight, absolutely none of which helped. Eventually he became almost totally blind, but, not wanting to give up his passion, he took to writing with red crayons on huge sheets of white paper, and even wore a white coat to maximize how much he could see thanks to the light reflecting off it.

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Much of his later work was done this way, so some of the greatest achievements in the English language were written like a child's kindergarten project. And hell, for all we know, words that Joyce invented, like "devlinsfirst" and "goragorridgeorballyedpuhkalsom," were in fact errors, and everyone called him a genius because no one wanted to be a dick to the blind guy.

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Sorkin says that he's the first person to test all of his roles, which means that at some point he spent an afternoon shouting "YOU can't handle the truth! You CAN'T handle the truth. You can't HANDLE the truth!" until he got it precisely right. And one time he was play-acting so hard that he lunged toward a mirror and broke his own nose. Apparently this was for that famously physical and demanding TV series The Newsroom, although we suppose it's possible that he had a cocaine relapse that went wrong and "intense Jeff Daniels role play" was the least embarrassing explanation he could muster.

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Well, you know when you're trying to think of the name of a song, but you can't remember any lyrics? You're all "It goes like duh-duh-DUUUH," and it's not helpful? To anybody? That's how Jackson wrote all of his songs.

Jackson would sing his songs like a kind of vocal musical notation, piece by painstaking piece, so the session musicians knew what to play. And not just the melodies or the big hooks -- Jackson sang every note of every guitar chord, string arrangement, bass lick ... everything. Here's his all-vocal demo of "Beat It":

So his demos were better than every professional a cappella group channel on YouTube.

Normally we'd say that it would be less work to just learn how to compose music, but when you're gifted a voice like Jackson's, you damn well show if off at every possible opportunity.

Nathan Kamal lives in Oregon and writes there. He co-founded Asymmetry Fiction for all your fiction needs. Molly is an avid reader and writer with all sorts of millennial dreams. She is also willing to write for food.

For more stories to bring out your inner smart person, check out 7 'Eccentric' Geniuses Who Were Clearly Just Insane and 6 Letters By Famous Geniuses That Prove They Were Huge Dicks.

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