Mae Whitman Quotes

I usually start with a repulsive character and go on from there.

Plot makes the character just as history makes the man.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

Every film you're commissioned to write is all about an arc; usually, the arc is that the world creates a change in the character, usually for the better. To not have an arc, the messages and ideas in the film became more prominent.

I think what good television does well is that it shows characters evolving.

All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.

I've often said the reader knows every bit as much about Thorne as I do. When I created him for 'Sleepyhead,' I was determined he should be a character who would develop, book by book, change and grow as we all do, and who - crucially - would be unpredictable.

One pleasure of working on a trilogy is watching characters warp and grow over time.

In TV, you may think your character's one thing for two episodes, and then the third episode it could be something different.

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

With a series, you build the character as you go. When you've got a shorter project or a film, you know the overall arc from the beginning.

You have 22 episodes to start from zero to hero; you can really take a nice, big, long arc. In a film, it's tough to do that - you only have 90 minutes.

I look for roles where there is some kind of an arc to the story.

Whenever you're blessed and given a second season, you can really let the characters evolve. That first season, you're setting everything up. It's background, where they're coming from, what they want to do. And then you get to marinate in it that second season.

I build my characters from the day they're born to the first page of the script.

My character on 'The Good Wife' is a smaller character, and his story arcs are typically season-long, unless it's a big episode for him. His transitions take place over many, many hours.

My books usually end where they began. I try to bring characters back to a point that is familiar but different because of the growth that they have gone through.

I'm drawn particularly to stories that evolve out of the character of the protagonist.

I love the trilogy form. I like the idea that you can establish a character in book one. And then in the second part, you can take the characters down to their darkest point. And then in the third part, you have total freedom either to give them redemption - or just to kill them.

I tend to relate to a character in terms of the arc: what's interesting is where he starts versus where he ends up.

I think everybody goes through changes, and the same should be said for fictional characters, especially ones that you follow on television.

I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.

In the writers' room, when we talk about each episode, we first talk about the character journey of the episode.

Being able to stay with a character over the course of years is a gift.