Karen Traviss Quotes

I write from this tight third-person viewpoint, where each chapter is seen through the eyes of one individual character. When I'm writing that character, I become that character and identify with that character.

My job is to see the world through the character's eyes.

When I'm writing from a character's viewpoint, in essence I become that character; I share their thoughts, I see the world through their eyes and try to feel everything they feel.

There are very few works of fiction that take you inside the heads of all characters. I tell my writing students that one of the most important questions to ask yourself when you begin writing a story is this: Whose story is it? You need to make a commitment to one or perhaps a few characters.

First person allows deeper insight into the protagonist's character. It allows the reader to identify more fully with the protagonist and to share her world quite intimately. So it suits a story focused on one character's personal journey. However, first person shuts out insights into other characters.

Within a single scene, it seems to be unwise to have access to the inner reflections of more than one character. The reader generally needs a single character as the means of perception, as the character to whom the events are happening, as the character with whom he is to empathize in order to have the events of the writing happen to him.

The more I love the character, the harder it is to get it wrong. I have to get to a point that I can speak for them.

I discovered you can get closer to a character's thoughts and feelings in a book than in a film.

I'm very comfortable writing in the first person; it dives into the character in a way that's difficult if you're writing in the third person.

When you're writing first person, all I can see and tell as the author is what that main character can see.

I have an affinity for writing in the first person. I love the intimacy of being dropped inside the character.

I don't really distinguish between sympathy and honesty when I'm writing. The two go together - I'm interested in inhabiting my characters, seeing the world through their eyes.

'The Last Of Us,' to me, is just amazing storytelling, because everything's from the character point of view, which even movies don't really do successfully a lot of the time.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it's imaginary. You don't have to pretend it's not a book. We don't have to pretend that people don't write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn't the only way to do it. Once you're writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

I'm never writing as a character.

I identify in some measure with each of my characters.

I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters.

I've always kind of gravitated toward characters who are a bit distant from the narrator or the point-of-view characters, so that's kind of important to me, to set up a different character who would be the point-of-view character for the story.

I think one of the hardest things about doing a book in the first person is that to a certain extent each day, when you begin to do your work, you're climbing into somebody else's skin.

If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.

Yet as a director, I don't feel you have to identify with your characters as a requirement to make a movie.

My readers often tell me that what they admire about my books is my ability to write from so many points of view. My challenge to myself is whether I'll ever be able to write a novel just from one point of view. It seems impossible.

As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.

I feel like there are things I can relate to in every character. But I feel like when you read a script, you don't get to see the definition behind someone, you just get to read what the person goes through and find a place to come from to make it real.

When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.