Chevy Stevens Quotes

What I write is emotionally honest and truthful as the human experience can be, to make people feel less alone, or at least that's the hope.

What I try to do in writing any character is to put myself in his position.

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.

What interests me when I'm writing is being able to crawl into a character's head and speak from his or her mouth. It's not pulling the strings on a marionette, it's not playing ventriloquist, and it's not mimicry. It's about inhabiting a character, and, at the same time, being totally unaware of what you've become.

Don't write about a character. Become that character, and then write your story.

I'm just looking for touching characters.

When I'm writing from a character's viewpoint, in essence I become that character; I share their thoughts, I see the world through their eyes and try to feel everything they feel.

I don't really distinguish between sympathy and honesty when I'm writing. The two go together - I'm interested in inhabiting my characters, seeing the world through their eyes.

I identify with the characters very closely. At the same time that I'm outside, writing, I'm also inside, experiencing, and it can be very unsettling.

Humanity has this need to hear stories because they connect us with other people, they teach us about our own feelings. We feel less lonely when we see other people going through the same things, even if they're fictional characters.

Show the reader what the character thinks about, and then the reader will think about it too.

For me, the key is always trying to find the connection between the audience and the character I'm playing. That's important to me, in any work I do.

Within a single scene, it seems to be unwise to have access to the inner reflections of more than one character. The reader generally needs a single character as the means of perception, as the character to whom the events are happening, as the character with whom he is to empathize in order to have the events of the writing happen to him.

The job of the art is to really convey and support that empathetic response. I always try to find where the character is mushy, and then bring that to the forefront.

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.

I want to go and write music that announces to you that you can feel something. I don’t want to tell you what to feel, but I just want you to have the possibility of feeling something.

Don't think about how your characters sound, but how they see. Watch the world through their eyes - study the extraordinary and the mundane through their particular perspective. Walk around the block with them, stroll the rooms they live in, figure out what objects on the cluttered dining room table they would inevitably stare at the longest, and then learn why.

Getting inside your character's head and letting the reader see the world through not just their eyes but their sensibility creates an intimacy that can't be duplicated in any other medium.

I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think— no, you will realize— that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying.

There's a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I'm writing a character where I put myself in their place.

You don't want to spend your life writing about stuff that doesn't matter. You want to try to pull out of the temporal mediocre and write in a way that is meaningful to everybody. This goes back to this idea of being intimate with your reader. Since we're all down here and we're all dying and aspiring and loving and feeling inadequate, all these things that we all are doing all the time, what a relief it is, when somebody looks at you and says, "Yeah, me too."

The purpose of a short story is ... that the reader shall come away with the satisfactory feeling that a particular insight into human character has been gained, or that his (or her) knowledge of life has been deepened, or that pity, love or sympathy for a human being is awakened.

I always want the audience to identify with my character in some way. I mean, sometimes you'll get characters that aren't very identifiable. Sometimes you can't relate to your character at all.

I do not wish you to act from these truths; no, still and always act from your feelings; only meditate often on these truths that sometime or other they may become your feelings.

If you connect emotionally with the plight of those characters, ou feel what they feel and you walk away with a sense of understanding and empathy, and hopefully, something has been illuminated for you. And I tink that's what happendd for a lot of readers with my novels.