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How do you think Martin makes his characters so interesting?


Mwm

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He's got a talent for becoming a character to know how they think. You have to be really willing and able to submerge yourself in their mindset. Lesser authors slap a few personality traits onto a character and have them do a set of actions. Martin gives his real strengths and flaws and doesn't hide or excuse either.

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He reads a lot.

He has been writing - stories, books, screenplays - for many years. Writers always write.

The film and television experience probably does give him a special skill at picturing and hearing his characters as he creates them.

He has seen many characters come to life in things he has created, collaborations, works by others. By trial and error, he has seen what works and what doesn't work in creating fascinating characters.

We don't all agree on the overall value of the tv show, but most of us probably agree that there are some astounding portrayals of some of the characters, and that those performances become part of our re-reads when we go back to the books.

He loves good stories and borrows from mythology, archetypes and other authors.

He plays chess, so he understands the "long game" and how to create expectations but then spring a twist that surprises the other player ( = the reader).

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I think, that him writing his books from POVs of different characters, creates in the plot some sort of a cliffhangers in the end of each chapter of each character. It's a very neat psychological and marketing trick, to make readers to become more and more curious and interested in further fate of all characters. And because readers also see inner worlds of all those characters, know what they think and feel, readers are also able to connect/relate with those characters. And because there's a lot of them (Cs with POVs), that's the reason, why ASOIAF is more captivating, more impressive, and leaves bigger impact on minds of its readers, than other books. It's much easier to capture lots of fishes with a net, than with a fishing rod. Jon, Dany, Bran, Cersei, and other POV characters are a fishing net, while readers are the fish. So I think, that GRRM is such a good writer, and is able to make his characters so interesting, because he's a good fisherman.

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Include bodily functions in your characters' daily routines.

Have the events be bigger than the characters, so it's not about them like it's their story, so they're not "equal" to their challenges as if the story is contrived just to show off the characters.  Rather show them coping with a reality that's larger than any of them, and with varying degrees of success.  Realism.

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Alright, to be fair, a sweeping multi-volume saga gave GRRM the pages he needed to develop his characters.  He had the room and he had the time to invest in character development.  It takes many pages to fully flesh out a character.  You can develop a few characters in a short story but to develop this many and at the depth that he did took five books.  GRRM had to make the story interesting enough to hook the reader while in the process of developing the characters.  Then the reader is really hooked once he or she has fallen in love with at least one character in the story.  I knew I had to read A Clash of Kings as soon as i read the magnificent ending of A Game of Thrones.  I was hooked.  

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