Charles Soule Quotes

Once the world has been created, the fantasy author still has to bring the story's characters to life and unfold a gripping plot. That's why good fantasy is such a hard act to bring off.

In chess, you have to bring all the pieces into the game. It is about development. In writing, you have to develop the story.

My writing has always been what you call 'narrative fiction' in the sense that it's got very strong plots and twists at the end.

I like people to be surprised by the turn of events. I don't want things just to be pat and formulaic. If there's some sort of internal combustion in the character or a desire to change the way things are going, that makes for conflict, which is the essence of drama.

Football is a bit like chess: it's not just the piece being moved that matters; it's also the effect that move has on all the other pieces.

A true nature is a gloomy monolith, sort of like that old black rotary phone that I had to sing 'Happy Birthday' to Grandpa on. But novelists, damn us, still need true natures - so we can give them to our protagonists. And so readers can vaguely predict how they'll behave when we trap them in 'situations' that they can't IM their way out of.

What I do is put my characters into situations that are so precarious there is no way to get out. And then I figure how to get them out.

A game of chess is a visual and plastic thing, and if it isn't geometric in the static sense of the word, it is mechanical, since it moves. It's a drawing; it's a mechanical reality.

Each player, it will be observed, has eight superior Pieces or officers, and eight minor ones which are called Pawns; and, for the purpose of distinction, the Pieces and Pawns of one party are of a different color from those of the other.

When I work on a novel, I usually have one character and a setting in mind.

My goal is to write books that are quality books with very real characters and a gripping plot.

There are a lot of techniques for developing a character.

I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.

You all know that each title in the Chronicles has a chess theme; that's partly because of the overall design of the Chronicles themselves - the game of chess as an analogue of the game of life.

Chess can be described as the movement of pieces eating one another.

I love the chess game that I do on 'Suits.' I just love every bit of it and that I get to do it.

Although I did admire David Foster Wallace's final unfinished novel about boredom, I'm no DFW, and I want my books to be exciting, not boring.

Designing characters for 'Dragon Quest' is fun but difficult work.

I loved writing 'Lost.' It was like a never-ending opera, in a way.

I'm just trying to create characters and tell stories.

Chess is a game of stimulation.

The story [for the western genre] is everything. Whether it's a book or a screenplay, the story drives everything. And if you just go out and try to make one by putting on boots and jumping on a horse and riding off... If you don't have the material, the characters and the things to overcome and conflicts that give life to drama, you don't have it.

I write about relationships and I try to create real-life characters.

Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.

I try to create new characters in each book I write. That's what makes writing fun and interesting for me.