Margaret Atwood Quotes

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character.

We don't experience our lives as plots. If I asked you to tell me what your last week was like, you're not really gonna give me plot. You're gonna give me sort of linked narrative. And I wanted to see how do we bring that into fiction without losing the reader.

Every character comes with its own challenges.

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

My books are character-driven. They're not driven by the story.

At the heart of every story is conflict - whether external or internal, make it a good one, and remember that this problem is going to shape your character, leaving her forever changed.

I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.

In the writers' room, when we talk about each episode, we first talk about the character journey of the episode.

The characters are always the focal point of a book for me, whether I'm writing or reading. I may enjoy a book that has an intriguing mystery or a good plot, but to become one of my real favorites, it has to have great characters.

I try to trace the connection between the characters and that way a story or plot emerges.

But I also wanted to give them an intelligent emotional journey, without having to suspend reality - to be able to look at those characters and see reasons for the relationships and why what happens happens.

When you find you don't like a character, you just type four letters and he's dead.

Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.

Plot makes the character just as history makes the man.

Characters are so important to a story that they actually decide where the story is going. When I write, I know my characters. I know how things are going to end, and I know some important incidents along the way.

My stories are character driven.

One thing George R. R. Martin does is surprising things to main characters. But he says so himself.

Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there's always some drive in it that is entirely personal - even if you don't know it while you're doing it.

It's necessary to track characters all the way through an opera. If you're dealing with more than one or two characters, it's very easy to forget that the others have lives of their own that feed into the story.

I'm always writing about character first. Plot, such as it is, comes from the characters.

If you have great characters, then your reader becomes emotionally invested in those people.

My books, I will say one thing - they all have a driving narrative, and you have to turn the pages, and the way you do that is to create characters that you really love and care about and put them in a fairly dire situation.

I'm interested in characters and relationships.

My characters are not thinking about the act breaks. They're thinking about what they need to do to move forward. As long as I focus on that, the story starts to progress. As soon as I think, 'We're 20 pages in, something better blow up,' we're in trouble.

As a writer, you understand how hard it is to build up backstory for characters, so you can have impactful moments. You have to build toward something and then pay it off.