Laura Anne Gilman Quotes

I try to keep my characters raising more questions than giving answers. I don't want to leave too much on the table. I want you to have your connection and your secret understanding of the character.

I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr.

Every paragraph should accomplish two goals: advance the story, and develop your characters as complex human beings.

. . . I felt that making her one-dimensional would be an insult to the audience, and also not as interesting. All destructive people have an inner side to them, and the more three-dimentional your characters are on screen the more compassion you can open up in an audience . . .. To me, that involves the audience more, it stimulates them and asks more of them.

The characters are telling you the story. I'm not telling you the story, they're going to do it. If I do it right, you will get the whole story.

When complicated characters aren't well drawn, they're boring.

I don't think I've seen that sort of character in a long time in this genre because again, there was a time when you could have quirky, strange characters that you grew to love, you didn't quite understand, you know, and then all of a sudden they became almost cardboard cutouts for awhile. You kind of know the guy, what his deal is - this guy's hard to figure out. He has some strange habits, but, you learn to love him and you discover more about him, where it comes from.

That's what makes characters interesting. If Sherlock [Holmes] had started out being a straightforward man, we wouldn't be talking about him now. If he became one, that would be interesting. But you have to give him somewhere to go, as [Conan] Doyle did.

I like the fact that a modern television and modern drama on cable has characters that are really intricate and deep and have multiple layers.

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.

I personally kind of yearn to play characters who are complex and who strike a truthful chord in me and who are challenged in some way and, I guess, who kind of move through those challenges.

I suppose that the sympathetic/unsympathetic debate about characters sometimes feels to me like a misstatement of purpose. I always think of truly complex characters are falling between the cracks in that debate.

You have to have a good script. You have to have compelling and complicated characters that you want to hang out with. Also, since you're going to be living with your crew and cast, I think it's really critical to create a great working environment, because we're spending so many days, so many hours together.

I'm always looking for complicated characters in fiction about whom I can feel a dozen feelings at once - in the space of a single paragraph, even.

When you're reading, like, a character's thoughts, or when it's in first person, you're reading kind of their own story, so you have the opportunity to see what makes that character complex or complicated. And to me, that's what the whole point of fiction is.

There's a bizarre insistence on how a story should be. 'The protagonist must be sympathetic!' they say. Whatever that means. I never engage in that discussion. I never use that word, 'sympathetic.' I just know 'interesting.'

I think often times on Joss Whedon's shows he can make you hate a character for a period and then love the character. He does it effortlessly.

In other words, the people who populate my books are more than caricatures.

As for dream roles, they usually just speak to you. I just crave complex characters.

I like complicated characters.

There are so few shows that are willing to take risks with their characters in the way that 'Homeland' does. And yet, the audience still comes back and loves those characters.

As a writer, as much as I try, I can't stop writing female characters. They have so much more to offer; they have to wear so many different hats. There's so much wonderful gray matter in a female's life that it just makes for a stronger character.

I like shows that are ensemble-based, that explore the humanity of every character.

What I always studied in screenwriting from my mentor John Glavin was that the most interesting characters are characters with shades of gray.

Your structure and format may not be perfect, and you may not have picked the perfect franchise, but if I pick up a script, and the characters are real, whole, complicated and come from a place of somebody who really is feeling it, that's what people remember.