Catherine Bybee Quotes

If you write a bunch of different characters with a bunch of different opinions, you end up with these long scenes of everyone standing around talking.

I try to think what the character is thinking. Then, hopefully, I begin to feel it. I act and react not because I'm recalling a dog killed by a fire engine, but because I'm concentrating on what the character is going through.

I think all television has to be about relationships and I don't think horror for the sake of it can work unless you're able to ground it in some kind of relationship.

As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.

Any show I'm working on, I want the stories to always be about something, and to have the potential to be emotional. That's the kind of story that I like.

Unlike novels with a hero or two heroines, in 'One Amazing Thing,' all the characters tell stories they've never told anyone before, so all the voices become equally important.

There's no rule that we have to like the characters movies are about.

If the characters are acting true to themselves, then that chemistry and suspense will flow.

I go to great lengths to make certain situations feel right to the reader.

Since I am first of all a character writer, that character's emotions are as vivid to me as my own. I always begin with an emotion after I have established a character in my mind. I feel what they feel. I guess that is why it comes across so strongly.

They didn't accept me theory - not a theory, but just a thought I had about this character. I noticed that this man only exists when the boy comes into the grocery.

If you can relate to what the character's going through, the story can be as ridiculous as possible, and people will relate to it. You can be fearless in your storytelling if you're vigilant about protecting your characters.

The scene is never really about moving the story forward on 'Breaking Bad.' That's the functional veneer of the scene, but it's always about what's going on with the characters.

I love to evoke the bones and meat and thoughts of characters.

If you have great characters, then your reader becomes emotionally invested in those people.

The 'Lost' style book is really quite set. We do things like, we walk through the jungle, and we stop and turn and talk to each other. We never talk and walk. We always stop to talk.

The real trick to these movies and making the big action sequences work - and I've forgotten this sometimes and screwed it up - the characters really have to be humanized. Because you can have the greatest special effects in the world, but if you don't care about the people in those effects, there's no impact.

Half of a broadcast show, in my experience, is things happening, and the other half is people talking about how they feel about the things that happened. And so there's this sense of everyone saying their subtext out loud.

To get a connection to your characters, you have to put them in a situation that you can feel yourself.

I've never been interested in watching or reading anything because it's the hero's story. I don't feel the need to be inspired by the character or learn a lesson. I feel the need to be engaged by them.

If a reader comes across a story that makes them cry, you can be sure that the writer felt every single thing that makes the reader cry.

My character has to be alive. It can't be a mere prop, and it has to have a life of its own. I need to have that space to play around and the scope to interact with the people around me. That freedom would give me a lot of margin to improvise with.

I don't think the challenge is asking an audience to like a character; it's inviting them to try and understand them... then making that journey entertaining and worth their while. It's a classic trick, but it's human, and it allows characters to have more depth.

When I read a script, the important thing is that I can connect in some way with that character and have some idea from what his story is that I can tell that story too, because that's all acting is, is storytelling.

I believe that every character is a setting, a world with moving parts, and on the other hand, every setting is, in fact, a character - a living breathing thing with personality and backstory. The way stories come to life, at least for me, is when these elements commune in relationship to one another.