Dinaw Mengestu Quotes

What I love about my work is that I'm forced to look through my character's eyes.

But I always need to identify with a character to write about him or her - and by 'identify,' I mean see the world through that person's eyes and have a strong sense of the inner logic of their acts and decisions, wacky or wrongheaded though they might be. In that sense, I think there's some of me in all of them.

Part of being a fiction writer is being able to imagine how someone else is thinking and feeling. I think I've always been good at that.

To write convincingly, I think you must be able to relate, in some way, to what a character is experiencing.

I do feel like that's what a writer does, is he goes into other people's heads.

A good journalist, as you know, is a great listener. And so's a good writer. And I got to listen to people for almost 20 years. That serves me well, I hope, when I try to understand how a character might be feeling, or how they might react.

The great thing about writing is that you always put yourself in the shoes of the character. If you're doing it right, you can see into the heart of all your characters. Usually, when there's a writing problem, it's because you aren't doing that.

When I'm writing fiction, I'm sort of interested by the fact that somehow or other I can have the feeling of actually seeing things through someone else's eyes.

I want to have compassion for my characters - I feel like I am the characters when I'm writing them.

That's the novelist's job: to peel back the layers and look underneath.

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?

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

The hardest thing is to write about people. First and foremost, you have to encounter their humanity. That is the only way you can make them live as characters on the page.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

I always find stuff in my characters to relate to.

If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You learn from great figures in literature.

I wrote my first play at the age of 10, 55 years ago, and I've always found it a fantastic relief to imagine I know what things would be like from the point of view of other individuals and to send out signals from where I actually am not. Playwrights never need to write from the place where they are.

You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you're a writer.

I don't have to live the lives of my characters to write about them. It's about really putting yourself in their shoes.

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.

I strongly believe that the art of the novel works best when the writer identifies with whoever he or she is writing about. Novels in the end are based on the human capacity, compassion, and I can show more compassion to my characters if I write in a first person singular.

I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you're going to write them convincingly.

I really like getting inside the heads of female characters. I think I can do that well, and I enjoy it.

There are technical tricks that may help you create more effective characters. My approach to characterization is not at all technical. I can't really analyze how I do it, but I am sure of one thing. To write convincing characters, you must possess the ability to think yourself into someone else's skin.