Michelle Huneven Quotes

I spend a lot of time with my characters.

The things I write about are completely removed from my own life, but people want to know the characters better.

A new character is like bringing a new human being into your life.

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

When I'm writing a story, which takes me a year or more, I can feel my character living with me - they're responding to whatever funny, familial, or social situation I'm in, and I think about their responses constantly.

Never argue with your characters; they know themselves better than you do.

I seem to have to make my characters family before I can access their hearts in any way that matters.

When I create characters, I create a world to inhabit and they begin to feel very real for me. I don't belong in a psych ward, I don't think, but they become very real, like my own family, and then I have to say goodbye, close the door, and work on other things.

To me, my characters are more real than most people I meet.

The characters in my stories all have quite loud lives in my head. It's a relief to get them on the page. Often they come from people I've noticed or overheard - but that is only a part of them. It's only by writing that I discover who these people really are.

As authors, most - most authors, our art is portraying the human condition. Trying to show you what it's like to be somebody else, trying to make you feel for somebody else. That means you have to have a high degree of empathy.

I love to evoke the bones and meat and thoughts of characters.

To imagine yourself inside another person... is what a storywriter does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

As a writer of fiction, you don't ever want to limit the characters you create to the life you've lived. That's insanity to me.

If I wasn't an actor, I never would have known who Debbie Gallagher was. I never would know how her feelings are or how her emotions are, or her family.

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

My characters aren't chess pieces. I don't move them around some big board. I actually care about these fictitious people.

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 interesting thing about fiction from a writer's standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you.

As an author you hope your characters have sparks but truly in the end they have minds of their own!

I always do make a back story for myself, but I'm not sure how necessary it is. I just like to.

You spend so much time writing a character the way I did with Buddy Baker and then Green Arrow that you start to care about them. And you almost think of them as people, you know?

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.

I just love to be able to actually build a character.