Mark Billingham Quotes

I spend a lot of time with my characters.

It's always nice to do the flashbacks. That's what's so great about 'Scandal' is that we get to do flashbacks and then keep figuring out and discovering more things about our characters that make them fuller.

Every character, for me, is a new discovery.

I do want to write about Jane Whitefield again, but only when I have a good enough idea - something I've figured out about her that's news and that's worth a reader's time.

In a series, you really need to stay open-minded. It's not like a play or a film, where you can create and fully commit to your character's back-story.

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.

And I have the support of the writers: I have a great relationship with the creative team, and they have a good hold of my character and my personality, and they come up with some great stuff, and I'm forever trying to change it up, keep it fresh.

Even in horror novels where you know most characters aren't going to make it to the end, it's crucial to have fully fleshed-out characters. If you don't do that, the reader doesn't care what happens to them.

'Longmire' is more of a show about the characters, and you couldn't pay a bigger compliment than to want to know more about my character, or the characters on the show.

I'm very much about stories that are fast but character development that moves slow.

I wanted more in depth ideas about the character and it never came.

When you get into a film, it is one story and one set development of a character, and you are able to delve into one character for a short period of time and discover everything about them.

One of the things that I've been trying to do with my characters, one of the things that does lead to me turning things down, is I don't really want to repeat myself.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

My characters surprise me constantly. My characters are like my friends - I can give them advice, but they don't have to take it. If your characters are real, then they surprise you, just like real people.

What's fun about doing a series is you get to take some time to create the character.

Whenever you're blessed and given a second season, you can really let the characters evolve. That first season, you're setting everything up. It's background, where they're coming from, what they want to do. And then you get to marinate in it that second season.

We have a writing process that's very much you try to create the character in a complicated way and then you let the story lead you to discovering who the character is in a natural way.

I honestly feel it is important for a director to get obsessed with the characters.

It's always incredible though when you feel like the writer knows the character intimately and can see their life sprawling away outside of the show.

I once took a workshop with Jim Shepard, and he has this term, 'rate-of-revelation,' that has come to mean a lot to me: 'the pace at which we're learning crucial emotional information about the stories' central figures.' An ever-increasing rate-of-revelation is good; a stagnant r-of-r is not.

As a writer, I feel like your favorite character shouldn't be safe.

With 'Sin Nombre,' there are parts that I wish were longer. And with 'Jane Eyre' especially, there were parts that I had to compress that I thought it would have been really nice to spend more time with - to spend with the characters.

From a writer's standpoint, each character and story presents its own unique challenges and delights. I'm deeply curious about all of my characters, and I love peeling away their layers to see what's underneath their skin, or secreted deep within their hearts.

I think books with weak or translucent plots can survive if the character being drawn along the path is rich, interesting and multi-faceted. The opposite is not true.