Joe Abercrombie’s Reddit AMA is all about a working writer talking about the machinery; how stories actually get built when you strip away myth, inspiration worship, and the idea that characters exist to be “liked.” What comes through in his answers is a kind of ruthless clarity: the book starts with the point-of-view cast, style is a function of psychology, and every choice is judged by what it makes the reader feel.
This piece pulls the most revealing craft threads from the AMA: characters as lenses rather than decorations, repetition as an emotional tell, names as worldbuilding shortcuts, and the surprisingly intimate origins of one of modern fantasy’s most iconic voices. It’s Abercrombie in miniature, funny, blunt, and quietly precise about how to make fiction feel painfully human.
And if there’s a single idea tying it all together, it’s this: for him, character isn’t a fixed identity. It’s a camera angle. Change the lens and the entire world changes with it.
Characters as Lenses
For Abercrombie, characters are not decorations. They are the architecture of the story. He says the point‑of‑view cast is “the heart of a book for me, so that’s probably the first thing I think about when planning a book”, and he approaches them like a director choosing camera angles.
Each character offers a different vantage point, a different distortion, a different truth. For example, in The Heroes, a novel about a single battle, he needed perspectives across different ages, ranks, and roles at various levels of the chain of command on both sides to create an overall snapshot.
He experiments with voices until they click, some leaping onto the page with joy, others requiring the slow grind of revision. He asks how they talk, how they think, what they notice, and what they ignore:
But as you write you hopefully develop an idea of what works for them. How do they talk. How do they think. What’s their level of education. Are they focussed on others, or on themselves.
He treats character not as a fixed identity but as a shifting lens through which the world becomes visible. This is why his narratives feel so textured; they’re built from competing perceptions, each one flawed, biased, and painfully human: “Some of this is instinctive, some is carefully thought out, most is trial and error.”
RelatedThe Abercrombie Method: What His AMA Reveals About Craft, Voice, and the Grind
A Repeated Phrase
When asked to complete the sentence “Say one thing for Joe Abercrombie,” he answered;
Loves the use of repeated phrases as a mechanism to express the inner lives of his characters.
It is a wonderfully self-aware line that captures something essential about his style. Repetition in his work is not filler. It is rhythm. It is emphasised. It is a way of showing how characters think, how they justify themselves, how they cling to certain ideas even when the world refuses to cooperate.
His repeated phrases become emotional signatures, small refrains that echo through the narrative. They are not catchphrases. They are psychological tells. They reveal insecurity, bravado, denial or longing. They remind the reader that people rarely change their internal scripts, even when everything else shifts around them. Abercrombie uses repetition the way a musician uses a motif. It returns at the right moment, carrying new meaning each time.
Borrowed Mannerisms
Abercrombie insists he doesn’t base characters on real people, at least not entirely. He says he might borrow “mannerisms or sayings or features,” but never the whole person. It’s a selective alchemy that keeps his characters grounded without turning them into thinly veiled portraits of friends, family, people he’s come across, and above all, himself: “They’re all me.”
They’re built from fragments, not replicas. He’s not interested in copying reality. He’s interested in distilling it. By taking only the details that spark something on the page, he avoids the trap of writing characters who feel constrained by their real‑world inspirations. Instead, he creates figures who are recognisable in their humanity but free to evolve in ways no real person ever could. It’s a method that respects both life and fiction, acknowledging that the two overlap but never fully align.
RelatedThe Independently Published Book That Gathered Over 30K 4-Star Reviews
The Power of Names
Abercrombie treats names as tiny engines of world-building. He explains that they can “give you a way in to a character or a culture and do a lot of world building work with zero space wasted on exposition.” It is a philosophy that shows how much he values economy in storytelling. He roots many names in real-world cultures, twisting them just enough to feel familiar yet strange.
Styria echoes Renaissance Italy, the Union leans Germanic, and the North feels like Viking England. Then there are the delightful outliers like Stranger Come Knocking, which he includes because real life is full of exceptions. He even admits that if a character is not working, he sometimes changes their name to see if it sparks a new angle. It is a reminder that identity in fiction is fluid until the moment it clicks. A name is not just a label. It is a doorway. And Abercrombie knows exactly how to build one that readers want to walk through.
The Origin of Glokta
When asked where the inspiration for Glokta came from, Abercrombie answered with perfect simplicity:
Me with a bad back.
It is a line that reveals how personal discomfort can become creative fuel. Glokta is one of his most memorable characters, a man defined by pain, cynicism and razor-sharp intelligence. The idea that he emerged from the author’s own physical misery adds a layer of intimacy to the character.
It shows how writers transform their experiences into something larger, stranger and more resonant. Abercrombie does not romanticise this process. He presents it as a matter of fact, almost accidental. Yet the result is a character who feels painfully real, someone whose internal monologue has become iconic. It is a reminder that inspiration does not always come from grand ideas. Sometimes it comes from the body, from the small daily agonies that shape how we move through the world.
RelatedThe Only Book Series With Over 3,000 Named Characters
Killing Characters
Abercrombie’s approach to character deaths is startlingly pragmatic. When asked which death he struggled with most, he replied,
I don’t think there’s any I’ve been conflicted about at all.
He explained that he does not connect to characters as people the way readers do. To him, they are “tools to be used to get a response from the reader.” It is not cruelty. It is a craft. He is not killing people. He is shaping emotional beats.
He says that if he considers killing a character but finds a better idea, he follows the better idea. It is a reminder that storytelling is not about loyalty to fictional individuals. It is about serving the narrative. His detachment allows him to make choices that feel shocking, inevitable and honest. It is why his books avoid sentimentality. He is not trying to protect anyone. He is trying to create the most powerful experience possible. And sometimes that means letting the axe fall without hesitation.
By the end of the AMA, Abercrombie’s “method” looks less like a set of rules and more like a stance toward story: start with the POV cast because that’s the heart, let voice emerge from what a character notices and ignores, and use rhythm, those repeated phrases, not as decoration but as the mind revealing itself under pressure. Even the small stuff matters: a name can do the work of a paragraph, and sometimes changing it is enough to unlock a character you couldn’t quite reach.
Then there’s the colder truth he doesn’t soften: characters are tools, and the job is the reader’s emotional experience, not the writer’s attachment. That detachment is exactly what gives his books their sting. He can let the axe fall cleanly because he’s not protecting anyone, not even his favourites. The result is fiction that feels honest in the way life is honest: biased perspectives, stubborn internal scripts, pain turned into voice, and consequences that don’t negotiate.
