Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

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.

I never started from ideas but always from character.

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character. Then again, there is a huge gap between me as a person and what I do in the novel.

I have found that the characters in my novels stay with me after a book has ended. I know them in some sense. I never map anything out. I just think until I am secure in the voice of one of them, and then let the character unfold.

Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters.

I try to be true to the characters that I've created and sometimes I disagree with them, but their opinions about the story and the characters really matter to me.

My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them.

You can never know enough about your characters

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?

As I write each new Thorne novel, I'm determined that whatever is happening plot-wise, a new layer of the onion will be peeled away and reveal something about Thorne that is surprising to me as much as anyone else. If I can remain interested in the character, then hopefully the reader will stay interested, too.

Creating characters is like throwing together ingredients for a recipe. I take characteristics I like and dislike in real people I know, or know of, and use them to embellish and define characters.

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

I love to see how a character unfolds off the page in a project. I don't always know how the character is going to turn out, even with the script being there. It's not always clear where that character is going to take me. Or where I will take them.

I don't base any character on a real person, and really don't do composites either. I make them up.

When I create a character, it happens in layers. The more I write and revise, the better I understand the characters.

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

I don't use recurring characters. I do get very interested in my characters while I'm working with them, and I find the process of fitting them into a story, and allowing them to create the story around themselves, fascinating. But no, I don't imagine they have a life outside of what I make for them.

I'm not in the business of meddling with people's destinies - and yes, my characters are real people to me. They have histories and thoughts and yearnings and hurts and misgivings and pleasures that don't belong to me.

What fascinates me as a writer is the stuff underneath, To me, what drives a novel is the curiosity behind the character and the depths that you want to find in that character.

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

I know some things when I start. I know, let's say, that the play is going to be a 1970s or a 1930s play, and it's going to be about a piano, but that's it. I slowly discover who the characters are as I go along.

Sometimes after a compliment about my characterization skills, I'm asked if I model my characters on real people. Emphatically, no. And sort of, yes.

Often the starting point for characters, for me, is finding a little, most minor detail, and I'll go from there.

I don't really base any of my characters on specific people that I know, although my characters are informed by the kind of people who live in my community.

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