A character to me can't be contrived. I don't like to contrive characters. They have to have an element of truth.
When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
I'm sure there's pieces of me in all the characters I play.
Ultimately, all characters have some negative and positive energies. That's just how I see it. I didn't go out looking for negative characters; I went out looking for people who have a struggle and a fight to tackle. That's what interests me.
I think that if you just write your characters you end up with something that people can access.
The ability of Americans to toss off oppressive characters is the most rewarding aspect, to me, of U. S. history.
I like characters that do big things boldly and are driven by intensely personal feelings.
You know you knit too much when. . . You will check out a book from the library just because you heard that one of the characters knits.
Action, reaction, motivation, emotion, all have to come from the characters. Writing a love scene requires the same elements from the writer as any other.
The characters created cannot just be a mouthpiece for the writer. When you look at a piece of writing, and it's genuine and it doesn't feel like every character is just a mouthpiece for the writer, but that they've been created in such a way that they're expressing an idea that a writer wants to get across, that's when a story succeeds.
I think my very earliest stories were all intellectual exercises and I was writing from experiences I had never had about characters who were about an inch deep.
When I think of 'Nightmare on Elm Street,' there was a warmth to those teenagers that I related to. They were not aware that they were in the middle of a horror film, and I really loved those characters and I empathized with them.
We had 1 book, the phone book, I've read it, it wasn't a great read, lots of characters, and on the end loads of polish people turn up.
There's a certain amount of pressure that goes with writing superhero characters, especially characters that are beloved to audiences. You know that you're always writing into a certain amount of expectations and into an existing fandom, and I try to take the pressure of that in when I first accept a project and then I try to push it aside as much as possible and just focus on the story that I want to tell. It's definitely a little more pressure than writing something of your own, from your own brain, and creating those expectations from scratch. But I also like the challenge of it.
So if u shorten words to get what u want in within 140 characters it makes u a twit?
When you deal with nonfiction you deal with human characters.
Few characters in history are indispensable.
In writing a series of stories about the same characters, plan the whole series in advance in some detail, to avoid contradictions and inconsistencies.
There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters. Even trashy bestsellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. - from the introduction of the 1986 Norton edition
There are likable characters in prison. Sometimes the worst criminals are also some of the most charming people.