Four ways they could have improved... A Song of Ice and Fire
George R. R. Martin's series sure is impressive, but it's also gotten extremely convoluted. The author allowed the story to "grow in the telling". One gets the impression that it's grown a bit out of control, and that a more selectivist approach early on could have resulted in a more neatly-confined, tightly-plotted saga. My advice would be (or rather, would have been , at the time): — Strip all the supernatural stuff away. No Wall, no Others, no Faceless Men, no warging, no 'greenseeing', no Children of the Forest (except in old stories that may or may not be true), no fire god magic (to revive the dead etc.) and certainly no dragons (that are alive in the present). — This allows you to significantly tidy up the mess of plot-lines. The least fitting characters, in my opinion, are actually the one tied to the great big supernatural arc: Jon and Daenerys. I think both of them are superfluous and weaken the stronger elements of the story. Since we've...