Whether a story is told on the page or on the screen, the same elements are required. You’ve got to have characters you can identify with, and there’d better be trouble brewing somewhere. Whatever these people’s lives have been before, they’re about to change in a big way. That’s what stories are all about.
– Jenny Wingfield
Tag: characters
Quotable 172
I think about the characters I’ve created, and then I sit down and start typing and see what they will do. There’s a lot of subconscious thought that goes on. It amazes me to find out, a few chapters later, why I put someone in a certain place when I did. It’s spooky.
– Tom Clancy
Quotable 163
Few humans can resist a good story. Stories are rooted in a multitude of personal experiences. A good story invites listeners to compare and contrast their own experience with that of the characters in the story.
– Bryan West
Quotable 160
Don’t expect the puppets of your mind to become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind, there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures into flesh and blood.
– Leslie Gordon Barnard
Quotable 142
Your characters can be loveable, or they can be evil, but they’d better be compelling.
– Po Bronson
Quotable 139
Come up with characters who have flaws, and let them fall on their faces every so often. … “Once upon a time they lived happily ever after” is not a story.
– Jenny Wingfield
Quotable 134
I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.
– Stephen King
Quotable 63
If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.
– David Foster Wallace
Quotable 62
Universal human experiences are a foundation of highly successful fantasy, mystery, historical, literary, women’s and romance fiction. Even literature’s most distinctive protagonists may seem like no others, but in fact what they go through resonates with us all.
– Donald Maass
Quotable 46
All the questions and choices of technique can overwhelm a writer. The only way that most of us get any writing done is not by thinking of technique, but by actively daydreaming the lives and actions of our characters and writing down what happens.
– Bruce Holland Rogers