Lena Waithe Quotes

Whenever people say they didn't like the main character of a book, they mean they didn't like the book. The main character has to be a friend? I don't get that.

I try to trace the connection between the characters and that way a story or plot emerges.

The idea of having different characters is really just to get the storyline across, you know? Coming from one particular character makes, to me, the story boring. I get that mainly from novels and that style of writing or movies where there's multiple characters who carry the storyline.

Action-adventure, that genre, only works for me if you can care about the characters. If the hero's not taking some kind of a journey, then there are no stakes - and no stakes, then you don't care if he lives or dies, wins or loses.

Characters who are on screen from start to finish are not necessarily the ones who have the greatest impact.

I tend to spend a lot of time building characters that the reader will believe in and sympathize with.

Normally when I'm sent a script I'll read it through to see how it hangs as a story and then I'll go back and read it through again and look at the character.

The hero is never the star of the story.

The stories that I like to tell and the movies I like are always grounded in the emotional arc of the characters.

I'll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villain.

In most shows, there's usually a hero or a protagonist, and even if there are multiple heroes or protagonists, most shows try and make it so you really always know who's the good guy and who's the bad guy.

When you're not playing the hero of the story, then you have to know that you're always a foil for the good guy. I love playing that. I think that's always an interesting place to be.

Storylines are how characters create the plots involved in their stories.

One thing George R. R. Martin does is surprising things to main characters. But he says so himself.

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.

Characters are the key to a good book. It took me several novels to comprehend that.

I guess I would say that most of what I've learned about storytelling derives from novels and short stories. I cannot think of a novel or story, or a novelist or story writer, who thinks in terms of three-act structure.

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

It's necessary to track characters all the way through an opera. If you're dealing with more than one or two characters, it's very easy to forget that the others have lives of their own that feed into the story.

I just want to be a part of great stories, whether I'm part of an amazing ensemble cast or I'm leading it or the antagonist or whatever.

It always takes awhile to find out who the characters are.

We seek to craft characters who inspire empathy: characters our audience will care for and, as a result, will care about what happens to them and thus will share the journey we have charted. A story, after all, is the character's journey.

There are always different roles and questions to be asked about certain characters.

My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me, if that makes any sense.