Maureen Johnson Quotes

Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.

I don't judge my characters, and that's my job not to judge them. It's my job to treat them with respect and to just look at it from their point of view.

Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.

I very much write from characters. Those people start speaking, and then I have them in the house with me and I live with them. Then at some point, it's time to get them out of the house. You can only live with someone like Dr. Georgeous Teitelbaum from THE SISTERS ROSENSWEIG for so long, and then it's time for her to go. But it is very like having the company of these people and trying to craft them in some way into a story.

In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully. You can't let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.

David Corbett's The Art of Character offers a deep inquiry into the creation of character for the novice writer, with valuable nuggets of wisdom for the seasoned storyteller. If you are a writer, it should be on your desk.

When you write a novel, you make other people see your imaginary friends.

I find the characters in my head and the more I write about them, the better I get to know them.

I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me.

Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.

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

One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.

If I just sit here, what am I going to do? I don't have a trade. I don't teach or anything. I just love to make up characters and gradually build a story around them.

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

I don't have a clear biography of my own that I could recount in an interesting way. I'm made up of the characters that I pulled out of my head, that I invented.

As writers, our job is to try to create, in a fake space, something that feels true. That's just straight-up fiction: Invent a character that doesn't exist; make them seem like they do.

Most writers, I'm afraid, live very boring lives sitting in front of a screen. However, having said that: every writer puts a bit of themselves into the characters to bring them alive.

All a writer's characters are imaginary, no matter whether they are based on real people or not. They are people as one imagines them to be.

Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational.

Your characters should be as smart as you are, if not smarter.

Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.

When you start writing the magic comes when the characters seem to take on a life of their own and write the words for themselves.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

Books are great for if you want to work on the craft of writing for yourself, or, you know, to write novels or indie films, stuff like that.

I always begin with a character or characters, and then try to think up as much action for them as possible.