The final Game of Thrones books are drifting "further and further away" from the TV show

gamesradar.com:

A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin says the final books in the series are drifting "further and further away" from the Game of Thrones TV show.

Martin's latest update (opens in new tab) on The Winds of Winter, and A Song of Ice and Fire more broadly, addresses one of the biggest concerns for fans of the books: that they'll end roughly the same way as HBO's Game of Thrones and thus won't be a huge surprise. Of course, book readers will know there are huge deviations in the plot and character trajectories already, but if those plotlines arrive at the same conclusion that played out on TV more than three years ago, well, that just kills a lot of the excitement in reading a book.

Until today's update, we were left to assume that would, by and large, be the case. 'So and so' people would die, 'this person' would become the leader of Westeros, and so on, just as we saw play out in the controversial final season of Game of Thrones. But now, Martin says you can expect some major changes to the way the books play out compared to the show, going as far as to confirm that characters who survived the show will die in the books, and vice versa.

Still, Martin says that his fluid writing style, which doesn't require he stick to a pre-determined outline of events, makes it difficult to predict exactly where the plot will go, and thus how much it'll diverge from the events of Game of Thrones the TV show.

"Another question that I get a lot, especially since the end of Game of Thrones on HBO, is whether A Song of Ice and Fire will end the same way," Martin says. "An architect would be able to give a short, concise, simple answer to that, but I am much more of a gardener. My stories grow and evolve and change as I write them."