Michelle MacLaren Quotes

There are bits of me in all my characters.

All my main characters have got bits of me, bits of my family, bits of my friends.

When you write a show, every character is you to some extent.

Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality.

In my early writing, all of my characters were exactly the same person. They all spoke the same, made the same types of jokes, reacted the same, etc. I think they were all just me in disguise.

That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose.

Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.

One of the things I love about writing is the way you can use what you know and what you've experienced, without actually writing about yourself. I've given many of my experiences and perceptions to many of the characters in the book, but none of them is me.

I think every writer will tell you that their characters are always partially themselves: who I am and what I've experienced. It's always there in part of my characters.

I always find stuff in my characters to relate to.

They are imaginary characters. But perhaps not solely the products of my imagination, since there are some aspects of the characters that relate to my own experience of a wide variety of people.

All my characters have got a big slice of me in them. A big piece of me, because it's my dialogue and this is the way I think and talk.

For the most part, there's so much of me in my characters.

What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.

The point of my explanation is I'm very subjective when it comes to describing my characters: they are all a little bit a part of me from the outside in or the inside out - but to put your mind at ease, I built Paul Snider from the outside in.

I don't believe you just create a character out of thin air, there's always something of yourself you bring.

There's some of me in all my characters.

I think as an author every character ends up low-key being some kind of self-insert.

I do not believe that with a fictional character you can force yourself too far away from yourself. There has to be some of you in it.

There's me in every character I put on the pages.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment. In fact, maybe that's really it. In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

I'm at the mercy of whatever character comes into my head.