Writing Characters Quotes

The thing with videogame characters is that they tend to be really undercooked, and people don't take the time to really flesh them out. They don't treat them with the respect that a writer writing characters in any other medium would treat their character. ~ Rhianna Pratchett

We're afraid of writing characters different from ourselves because we're afraid of getting it wrong. We're afraid of what the Internet might say. ~ Gene Luen Yang

THE STORIES WE TELL fearlessly explores the textures of the human heart, finding a path toward hope through a Savannah that is jagged with class issues, faith misused, and broken trust. Henry loses you in a landscape peopled with secret keepers, storytellers and liars, and proves that in the end, love is the only reliable compass. This is everything you expect from Patti Callahan Henry - lyrical writing, characters worth rooting for, a sure-footed belief in the power of goodness - plus a twisty plot that will keep the pages turning long into the night. ~ Joshilyn Jackson

It was great but intense to try to go back into a character's mind, a mind that is filled with self-loathing and a mind that is male. It is fun to try to psychoanalyze why a character acts and feels the way he/she does, and doing it as a different gender lends itself to many challenges. My desire to delve into the male psyche comes from many years of being drawn to men that seem to have a darker side. But there is also light in them, and it is that duality and intensity that makes me feel alive. Thorne is very much that man as is my first male protagonist, Michael, from the Natalie's Edge series. Each man, while plagued with a dark past and demons, has this glorious light within them, fighting noble causes. I picture them as true anti-heroes, like the likes of Batman, the Dark Knight. ~ R.B. O'Brien

I like writing characters that seem different from one another. So if you were to hypothetically look at a bunch of lines from books I've written, just out of context, hopefully you would be able to determine who said what. That's the goal, anyway. I try to strongly differentiate through dialogue. ~ Charles Soule

What's actually amazing is that, after a couple of years of living with characters and writing characters and talking about characters, as we sit in the writers room and break episodes, it strikes you, every once in awhile, that you're talking about a character that's played by the same actor, who you've been talking about forever. We talk about a character dying, so you get emotional, and then you realize, "Oh, but wait, that actor is still on the show." ~ Jeff Pinkner

A writer appears in everything that he does. That said, I felt like writing characters with my own name, in fact, provided me with something of a smoke screen. ~ Joshua Cohen

Be vulnerable. Take a chance. Step outside your comfort zone. Try something new and daring and audacious. Maybe it's changing jobs or changing cities or simply changing your hair color. But do something different than what you do every single day. Take a risk. Even if you're not ready to. Because you never know how important and vital the sentence you're writing today is to the bigger story your life is trying to tell. ~ Mandy Hale

No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life
the first twenty years of it
had about them something semi-fictitious. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

I always felt a little worm inside me: 'Now you need to write a novel with a woman protagonist.' ~ Carlos Fuentes

As our economy faces up to potential labour shortages due to our ageing population and as it moves to a new level of sophistication to compete with the rest of the world, we're going to need every Australian on board pulling their weight, rejoining the workforce, gaining new skills. Writing off individuals and communities suffering from poverty just creates a dead weight for our economy to drag along. ~ Julia Gillard

The real pleasure in writing this, for me, was discovering how little you need. ~ Jonathan Franzen

I teach writing courses and first of all, I teach my students what prosody is. ~ Theodore Sturgeon

The true writer must write not the acceptable but the true. ~ David Mamet

I wouldn't write anything autobiographical. If you've lived a life like Laurence of Arabia, it might be a consideration, but otherwise it's a little bit vain, it seems to me. ~ James Lee Burke

This is why people like writing. You visit old friends without having to go on Facebook and see what they're up to and deal with what idiots called FOMO. You make them into what you want them to be, the people they could be if only they were braver, smarter. ~ Caroline Kepnes

Which isn't the truth, you understand. At least you understand that in your head ... but not always in your heart. ~ Stephen Leigh

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations. ~ H.L. Mencken

The diversion of baiting an author has the sanction of all ages and nations, and is more lawful than the sport of teasing other animals, because, for the most part, he comes voluntarily to the stake, furnished, as he imagines, by the patron powers of literature, with resistless weapons, and impenetrable armour, with the mail of the boar of Erymanth, and the paws of the lion of Nemea. ~ Samuel Johnson

Having deadlines helps because people are constantly breathing down my neck, and tapping their toes waiting for pages. So I just have to work nine to five. If I didn't have deadlines then I might be more of a golden hour kind of guy, writing from eight to noon and calling it a day, but that's just not the way I work right now. ~ David Lindsay-Abaire

Branding is a lot of things, but one thing it's not is soft.

When you brand, rebrand or brand-diggity, ask yourself one thing to do it right: how will my brand create buyers?

If you're in business, that's the goal. Buyers. Branding done well creates both long term loyalty and timely purchases. ~ Richie Norton

Writing is a really good first step toward that goal of knowing yourself. ~ Jewel

You could write a joke in the pub at lunchtime and watch it performed on television that evening. ~ Eric Idle

Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out. ~ E. M. Forster

Once you're done being president, you tend to want to defend your record more than plumb your inner feelings. I find it hard to imagine Obama going home at night and writing sensitive, introspective journal entries about his meeting with John Boehner. ~ Gail Collins

What a labour writing is ... making one sentence do the work of a page; that's what I call hard work. ~ Virginia Woolf

Every serious man in dealing with really serious subjects carefully avoids writing ... There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any writing of mine dealing with this subject. ~ Plato

Neither man nor God is going to tell me what to write. ~ James T. Farrell

Whether these characters are lovable or detestable, they're lovable or detestable in a TV way - defined by a minimal set of traits that are endlessly reiterated and incapable of expansion or alteration, a fixed loop. ~ Jonathan Rosenbaum

I write my novels personally, desperately and non-negligently. When I write my novels, I think about my novels only, and never do other works. ~ Haruki Murakami

My writings are the mirror of my soul and the dance of my mind. ~ Debasish Mridha

There is an art to writing, and it is not always disclosure. The act itself can be beautiful, revelatory, and private. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die. ~ Carlos Fuentes

Not really a quote but here is is
The setting is the start.The story hangs from that hook,and the characters move slowly around one another.
Each piece has its own shape and size.
The characters think they see the wires that connect them.
But that isn't possible.
Or is it?
Who makes the rules? ~ Blue Balliett

The ultimate message of this book, though, is not that should strive for publication, but that you should become devoted to the craft of writing, for its own sake. Ask yourself what you would do if you knew you would never be published. Would you still write? If you are truly writing for the art of it, the answer will be yes. And then, every word is a victory. ~ Noah Lukeman

To read without writing is to sleep. ~ St. Jerome

Some days I wonder if I stopped writing about him, if I'd love him a little less. ~ Dominic Riccitello

I'm very, very open to experimenting with different people and trying to find different methods of writing and making music. ~ Paul Weller

My life's purpose is to write poetry - but behind the poetry must be the vision of a fresh revelation for men. ~ William Soutar

But the real life of a writer resides in showing up at the keyboard every day, with the necessary patience and mercy, and making the best decisions you can on behalf of your people. It's a slow process. It often feels hopeless, more like an affliction than an art form.
Most of us will have to find our readers one by one, in other words, and against considerable resistance. If anything qualifies us as heroic, it's that private perpetual struggle.
Put down the magazine, soldier. Forget about the other guy. Remember who you are. ~ Steve Almond

If someone's going to publish a book about addiction, it has to say something new and different. It has to be something we haven't read before. A lot of these books are published because the writing is wonderful. The Frey book has superb writing, and that can be enough to sell a book. ~ Charles Adams

In life," he said, "there are no essentially major or minor characters. To that extent, all fiction and biography, and most historiography, are a lie. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. Hamlet could be told from Polonius's point of view and called The Tragedy of Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark. He didn't think he was a minor character in anything, I daresay. Or suppose you're an usher in a wedding. From the groom's viewpoint he's the major character; the others play supporting parts, even the bride. From your viewpoint, though, the wedding is a minor episode in the very interesting history of your life, and the bridge and groom both are minor figures. What you've done is choose to play the part of a minor character: it can be pleasant for you to pretend to be less important you know you are, as Odysseus does when he disguises as a swineherd. And every member of the congregation at the wedding sees himself as the major character, condescending to witness the spectacle. So in this sense fiction isn't a lie at all, but a true representation of the distortion that everyone makes of life.
"Now, not only are we the heroes of our own life stories–we're the ones who conceive the story, and give other people the essences of minor characters. But since no man's life story as a rule is ever one story with a coherent plot, we're always reconceiving just the sort of hero we are, and consequently just the sort of minor roles that other people are supposed to ~ John Barth

Writing fiction is an inherently political activity because people-even imaginary ones-do not live in vacuums ... From Twilight to Romeo and Juliet to The Little Mermaid, no work of the imagination is truly apolitical, because the world and our hopes for it are always part of our stories. ~ John Green

Writing a manual forces you to place your thoughts and ideas down on paper. ~ Tara VanDerveer

Words are timeless. You should utter them or write them with a knowledge of their timelessness. ~ Kahlil Gibran

I note however that this diary writing does not count as writing, since I have just re-read my year's diary and am much struck by the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along, sometimes indeed jerking almost intolerably over the cobbles. ~ Virginia Woolf

People believe in everything except the reality. ~ Min Kim

And the writing is still : to you, with you, about you, because of you and for you. ~ Nizar Qabbani

So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store. ~ William Gibson

I don't see a difference between playing a performance capture role and a live action role, they're just characters to me at the end of the day and I'm an actor who wants to explore those characters in fantastically written scripts. The only caveat is a good story is a good character. ~ Andy Serkis

Writing a song doesn't heal things. Even if the song comes up with a solution, it's still only a theory. Going out and living my lyrics is a whole other deal. That takes courage. ~ Alanis Morissette

If it were up to me ... " and then the words pound, desperate and hard, "I'd write this story differently." ...
"Just that maybe ... maybe you don't want to change the story, because you don't know what a different ending holds."
The words I choked out that dying, ending day, echo. Pierce. There's a reason I am not writing the story and God is. He knows how it all works out, where it all leads, what it all means.
I don't. ~ Ann Voskamp

My major aim in writing is to set out flags and issue wake-up calls. ~ James Broughton