Garth Risk Hallberg Quotes

The instant that movies became described as character driven was the instant when characters stopped mattering in movies. In other words, the birth of the notion of the character-driven movie coincided with the birth of movies in which characters were incidental to the very activities in which they engaged.

I like character-driven stuff. It doesn't matter, the size of the part.

When you're writing a book, with people in it as opposed to animals, it is no good having people who are ordinary, because they are not going to interest your readers at all. Every writer in the world has to use the characters that have something interesting about them, and this is even more true in children's books.

There's a bizarre insistence on how a story should be. 'The protagonist must be sympathetic!' they say. Whatever that means. I never engage in that discussion. I never use that word, 'sympathetic.' I just know 'interesting.'

My books are primarily plot driven but the best plot in the world is useless if you don't populate them with characters that readers can care about.

If a movie has more characters than an audience can keep track of, the audience will get confused and lose interest in the story.

I try to distinguish my characters from each other.

It's your job to come up with compelling characters who speak to an individual authenticity. If I'm not interested in the characters, I can't go on. I have to be fascinated by them.

I put heavy emphasis on the characters.

Stories are important, but I'm really into characters, and if you can give birth to a good one, that's true success.

I get very invested in characters; it's the only way I find that I can write a book and really make it work.

When it comes to a character, I make sure that it adds to the plot.

It does not matter to me how many dialogues I have in the film or the screen time. It is all about story and characters for me.

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.

I mean, can I really create a full, three-dimensional character? I don't know anymore. I'm certainly going to try.

I always try to make my characters people, and yet I always want to entertain.

One of the things that separates a good genre movie from a bad genre movie, I always think, ironically, is when you care about the people. The dime a dozen ones are where you don't have any awareness of the character.

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.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

To me, characters are at the heart of great literature.

Overpopulated fiction can be so confusing that readers put the story down. Under-populated novels can seem claustrophobic or boring. You want the right number of characters for your particular work.

What makes characters real are details, and if you're crafting a person from scratch, you're probably not going to pay as much attention to a question like, 'Does this person bite their nails?'

The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.

I love... What's gratifying to me is when you make/create a character and a human being, a person who lives entirely and who has their own existence, just merely from the words on a page.

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