"Wait until the book is finished before making a judgment on its content. By the time you have gone through twenty drafts, the characters may have developed lives of their own, completely separate from the people you based them on in the beginning. And even if someone, at some time, gets upset with your words—so what? Live your life, sing your song. Anyone who loves you will want you to have that."

"When writing fiction with high impact, there’s no subject matter too taboo, no character too eccentric, no emotional content too intense, no themes too difficult. It’s all in how you handle it. What overcomes all objections are characters who compel, stories that grip, and writing that amazes."

"The reporting of facts ... rarely contains the whole truth.  I say this because facts involve people and people are made up of contradictions.  The reporting of what happened rarely includes the more important question of what the story means to the people who stand at its center."

"The 'how' of what that process is down there, I have no idea.  All I know is that characters keep emerging, voices keep speaking to me, and I keep writing them down."

"What surprised me in my most recent reading?  Original subject matter, plot twists, character quirks, anomalous moments, unusual descriptive language, curious observations, sudden shifts in focus, psychological and emotional truth, the handling of time, and formal changes in approach."

"Conflicting feelings snare readers. They're a puzzle that demands solution, a cognitive dissonance that's too noisy to ignore."

"We want to see the hard choices and we want to see where they lead for your characters. None of us can go back in time and change difficult decisions we've made in our lives. So we go to Story to evaluate whether or not we made the right choice. We either find comfort from stories that show us that we've done the right thing. Or on the other side, when we make a mistake, in a Story we get to experience the path of a different course. Risk Free! A new map to help us find our courage. We go to Story to experience life at the edge, where we've been shaken in our boots in our own lives. This is what stories are for…to reassure us that we've made the right decision in our own lives or to help us recognize our mistakes, learn from them and find the courage to change."

"Your job [as an actor] is to create an interesting, captivating character that serves the text.  That's it."

"Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.  Plot is observed after the fact rather than before.  It cannot precede action.  It is the chart that remains when an action is through.  That is all Plot ever should be.  It is human desire let run, running, and reach a goal.  It cannot be mechanical.  It can only be dynamic."

"The antihero is always going to come back because it's an easy crutch.  It also appeals to people in the film business.  Especially the film business, because it's an immoral business."

"Stand aside, forget targets, let the characters, your fingers, body, blood, and heart do."

"What narrative teaches us about characterization: we are all made up of contradictions, and, as a result, we are all somewhat unknowable.  We are capable of surprise precisely because of this fact."

"The key for me in writing character is finding out who are the most important people in my characters' lives, and what they wish they could make clear to them."

"One of the reasons a lot of us read fiction—including me—is that we respond to characters in fiction as if we are responding to people.  We can have intense reactions to them.  We can enjoy them as people."

"Real storytelling happens when writers forget the 'rule book' and write to the characters. They get inside the people in the story and experience the sights, the sounds, the smells, the emotions, and they let the reactions of the characters drive the incidents of the story."

"I don't think that we can minimize the value of what happens when we normalize, through entertainment, other cultures and orientations."

"The further you get into a book—the longer you live with a character—the more you realize that nobody's regular, nobody's average.  Everyone's life is incredibly complex."

"Across genres, for one reason or another, various filmmakers—sometimes even those considered the most visual of directors—have drawn on devices dating back 2,500 years to the days of Hellenic theater because there are limitations to showing; showing can't always get us inside a character, or inside a character's story."

"I think you can tell as a reader when a character starts making a statement and you can suddenly hear the author talking."

"Thrilling as it may be to read about something extraordinary and entirely foreign to our own experience, it's also wonderful to encounter ourselves on the page, to feel the rush of 'that's me, exactly!'"

"A good portion of the writing process is subconscious and your subconscious mind is arranging things before you see them on the page, so you feel like a character is taking over at certain points.  I think that is more a function of your mind anticipating things.  You've created a constellation of words that have a living quality and they end up feeling like they have a life of their own."

"There's psychology in anything if you're creating believable characters, but there's an enormous amount that's important that happens outside you, and science fiction and fantasy and detective novels and romances tend to be about action."

"The thing that you need to never forget is that, when it comes to fiction, everything is made out of words.  What you end up with serves as a catalyst—it's a series of words that interacts with the mind of the reader to create something that feels like a real person to them." (artist)

"You always try to think in terms of what would be worse, what would be harder for these characters.  Because those are the moments when people really show their best selves.  Also, those are the things that people don't really talk about a lot, but they want to know about.  We're sort of afraid of it.  So as a writer, you go into those dark places, and I think that's what keeps the pages turning." 

"As well as talking for the sake of it, too often what people say in films doesn't remotely resemble what they would say in real life."

"The novel about character (in which character is primary) is never going to die.  I still read a lot of books because I'm interested in the characters.  I think everybody does to some degree or another."

I was further learning that my characters would do my work for me, if I let them alone, if I gave them their heads, which is to say, their fantasies, their frights.

"If you think of films often cited as 'perfect' movies,' whether it's old Hollywood films like Casablanca (1942) or more modern classics like Chinatown (1974)—it's not just the pictures you remember.  It's the characters' voices."

"Once you define a character, they tell their story."

"To write a story that truly surprises the reader, turns the reader's (and the writer's) preconceived notions inside out, requires unconditional empathy—the courage to imagine not just your hero's virtues but also his flaws in all their grotesque and destructive truth."

"Ask readers what they love about great novels and most often they mention great characters."

Worlds of Wonder

"We never want our idea of our story to get in the way of letting our characters live." (artist)

"High-impact 21st century fiction is built on unique voices, uncommon characters, and tales that can only be told by a particular author. They're sui generis."

"Male writers with female readers also feature strong female characters in their novels."

"If your character doesn't have a goal, she's just a bunch of your words deceptively held together by an actor."

"For me, the thing that triggers the moment in my unconscious when a character is ready to speak or be spoken of, ready to be a story, is a flash of intuition about that character's yearning. What is it at her deepest level that she yearns for?" (artist)

"The characters who resonate most widely today don't merely reflect our times, they reflect ourselves. That's true whether we're talking about genre fare, historicals, satire, or serious literary stuff. Revealing human truths means transcending tropes, peering into the past with fresh eyes, unearthing all that is hidden, and moving beyond what is easy and comfortable to write what is hard and even painful to face."

"Bond me to your characters.  Put them through a fearsome story.  Force me to feel what they feel.  Show me how they change.  Finally, make me see things your way."

"More than anything, it's about telling your story through the viewpoint of characters who you'd spend four hours with over dinner, then spend four more hours with the next night.  If you can bring characters to life and invent a voice for them, so that they seem to be speaking in our own heads as we read, you will have a highly readable manuscript."

"Douse your main characters in gasoline.  Have your secondary characters throw Molotov cocktails.  You are a god hurling thunderbolts—or you can be."

"As writers, we were driven to feature women like us, to tell our stories in a vernacular descriptive of our own lives, our hopes and fears, neuroses and dreams."

"Just write the stories you want to write.  If you are writing about authentic characters, we (agents, then editors, then readers) will care."

"I believe in sending characters down fearful paths.  Stories pushed beyond the limits of comfort stick in readers' imaginations."

"Don't talk to me in market speak.  Tell me about your characters and the crisis they are trapped in, and make it seem serious, big."

"I really don't think about my readers when I write—I am utterly at the beck and call of my characters and so absorbed in the world of their story that it becomes my reality."

"If the setting is a spaceship or a magical land then we'll call it genre fiction, but anyone should be able to get caught up in the lives of such characters."

"Freya once said if you write your characters correctly and know them well, they will then tell their own stories.  It was the best piece of writing advice I've ever received."

"The hardest part is, you can't start a book unless that character is going to change in some way.  Character is the best plot."

"An ending says something about the story and the characters. It also says something about you the author."

"I write stories.  I want to know what motivates people, so I create stories to venture answers.  My sister is a sculptor; she uses a different medium, but she's still looking for something."

"[Chase] down characters who resist coming face to face with their truest reflection."

"Character matters more than anything else."

"You need to open with character awesomeness rather than event and explosions... action only matters when we give a rat's right foot about the characters involved."

"The characters I tend to write are going to be quixotic. They're going to fail a lot and fall a lot, but theres a romance in trying for honorable things."

"Give them a character they love.  You have to have a character that people empathize with.  And then you have to have one of those moments of universal emotion." (on the key to great story that gets people talking)

"The properties of people and the properties of character have almost nothing to do with each other. They really don't. I know it seems like they do, because we look alike, but people don't speak in dialogue. Their lives don't unfold in a series of scenes that form a narrative arc. The rules of drama are very much separate from the properties of life. I think that's especially true of Shakespeare."

"In every character I write, there's a little piece of me.  And they're all interesting to me, enough that I would write a book about them ... It's exciting to imagine being different people."

"You're aiming for satisfaction for the audience, not happiness for the characters. They may coincide. They may not."

"Fiction is the examination of the human heart as individual characters move through scenes that test—or perhaps change—their souls."

"That's probably what draws me to fiction: It feels like the most elastic place to explore people.  And probably the most forgiving place."

"A great storyteller is born.  You can learn structure quite easily, but great story and character come from people born with great imagination and the empathy to see many characters from different points of view."

"It's this funny headspace you get in, where you're acting, really.  ....  You literally pretend you are this person, and you go about your life as if you are this person.  And so, when people will ask me, 'Did you like this character?' I don't know.  Because I'm so far inside them, I can't judge them at all.  You're behaving as if you are this person."

"How could I outline the guy?  I had no idea who he was.  I had to get on the page and kind of feel around and talk to him and see what he could do." (on outlining vs. not and writing his main character)

"Characters will come alive if you back the fuck off."

"If elements of my own life sift themselves into the plot, it's because they feel organic to the story I am telling—a story that distinctly belongs to the characters and not to me.  I try to listen to the demands of the story and stay true to them."

"When you're writing, you have to get really close to your subject and see the weird and unexpected 'colors' there.  Even a character who's supposed to be incredibly sexy should have flaws.  Even a tragic scene should have those weird moments of humor or joy.  Those little details are the rich part of your writing, and the only thing language should be doing is translating what you 'see' as cleanly as possible to readers."

"You just have to say, 'This is who this [character] is.  And I'm going to write it the way I see it and the way she feels it, and have faith that readers will follow."

"You just have to say, 'This is who this [character] is.  And I'm going to write it the way I see it and the way she feels it, and have faith that readers will follow."

"Know your own characters as surely and completely as you know yourself.  ....  If you know him so well that he is entirely real to you, your work is done, for he will act out his own story to its inevitable conclusion and you will only have to set it down."

"I'd written women's fiction, chick lit, and historical romance.  Almost every agent I submitted to said, 'Wow, like your voice, but, um, the heroine is kind of ...grouch.'  Then, in 2010, I decided to try writing YA.  Suddenly, my heroines weren't grouch.  They were spunky."

"We get to know our characters the way we get to know the other people in our lives: by spending time with them, by seeing how they interact with others and how they function under pressure, by learning how they see themselves and how they want to be seen."

"I get to know my characters like you'd get to know someone at a cocktail party.  You sit down with them and listen."

"When you place your characters onstage and let them improvise, magic can happen."