Greg Rucka Quotes

Characters are incredibly important, but I tend to build them around the plot during the outline stage. However, once I'm writing the manuscript, the characters I'm writing dictate how the plot unfolds.

I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.

I try to begin with a strong grasp of my characters. Even if it's schematic, I need it clear in my head who these people are.

I tend to come up with people more than situations - most of my books start with a character.

Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don't need to be told what to do.

I like to take a character and develop it.

I'm about my characters.

Stories are important, but I'm really into characters, and if you can give birth to a good one, that's true success.

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

How I work is I work from of very character-driven place. And I trust the writers.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

Because characters are your creations, you are the one who ultimately gets to decide their fate.

I live intimately with my characters before starting a book. I cut out pictures of them for my wall. I do time lines for each major character and a time line for the entire novel: What is going on in the world as my characters struggle with their problems?

You've got to leave the reader with more than just a name and a costume - they need to know who the character is, what they're like, what kind of attitude they have, what sort of role they play.

Don't start writing your novel until you know your characters very, very well. What they'd do if they saw somebody shoplifting. What they were like at school. What shoes they wear. Spend days - weeks, months - being them until they thicken up and start to breathe.

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

I think action should be revealed through character, so if you have a plot problem, it's probably a character problem.

If somebody from the past doesn't rise up from the grave and start talking to me, I haven't got a book. I have to hear that voice, the voice of the narrator. How she sounds will tell me who she is, and who she is will tell me how she will act - and that starts the plot in motion.

So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.

Coming from TV and film, rule number one is that you always service the main character first and foremost. If that's not working, you've got nothing.

Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there.

Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.

When you create a character, you create it for yourself - you do whatever you want. It's your job to explore it in as many different avenues as you can in order to make it a fully wounded character.

I want to give every single character the dimensions and complexity of a main character.