Cristina Henriquez Quotes

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

If the characters are not alive to me, it doesn't matter how good the sentences are. It just becomes all cake and no frosting.

Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, I've never had the sense I was 'making up' a character. It feels more like watching people reveal themselves, ever more deeply, more intimately.

When I write a book, characters come to life for me somewhere at the back of my head. I strive to make them flesh and blood in an abstract way, in words.

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.

The people I write are real to me, and basically, they tell me about their environments on a need-to-know basis.

And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.

The fun thing about doing origin stories is you are introducing the audience to characters.

I just want to tell a good story, so I always ask myself, 'Are these people real to me?'

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.

I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

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.

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

I don't plot my novels - I move along with my characters.

When you've got good writing, you can kind of give up all the research, in a way, and start just following the emotional integrity of the journey of your character.

I'm still really fascinated with characters and people and telling their stories.

So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.

I hate the analyzing thing. People say, 'Why do you think your character did that? I don't know. I'm not an analyst, and they're not in psychotherapy. Unless it's a film where they're in therapy.

I'm about my characters.

One of the challenges is creating characters. I am trying to compose my sentences to express epic events happening to ordinary people.

Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?

I'd like to think I'm not quite so pretentious as to think my characters go off and live their lives once I've written the final page and switched the computer off.

There is nothing that's been in any of my novels that, in my view, hasn't been either illuminating surroundings or defining a character or moving a plot.