Danielle Steel Quotes

I love making characters real and believable, through my own experience and choices.

My first job is to write the characters as full and authentic people as well as I can.

The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.

All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.

You need the audience to become invested in the characters and in order to become invested, they need to identify with the characters... and that's why the characters need to be real.

It's hard to know whether certain characters come to life or not, they either come to have their own life or they don't. I've written many things in which the characters just remain inert.

I try to ground most of my characters in reality somehow. That's kind of what I bring to the table.

Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.

Normally you read a screenplay - and I read a lot of them - and the characters don't feel like people. They feel like plot devices or cliches or stereotypes.

It's very hard to connect with a character when you haven't gotten a sense of who they are.

I like to write characters that feel like people that I would know.

I always try to make my characters people, and yet I always want to entertain.

What makes characters real are details, and if you're crafting a person from scratch, you're probably not going to pay as much attention to a question like, 'Does this person bite their nails?'

The only virtue a character needs to possess between hardcovers, even if he bears a real person's name, is vitality: if he comes to life in our imaginations, he passes the test.

There's a bizarre insistence on how a story should be. 'The protagonist must be sympathetic!' they say. Whatever that means. I never engage in that discussion. I never use that word, 'sympathetic.' I just know 'interesting.'

I do not choose characters because I think, 'Wow, that woman is so strong.' I chose these characters with utmost conviction because I think they were realistic enough to exist, and I really liked the scripts.

Knowing that Gene and Morgan were playing those roles made it much easier to put the script together-we knew who we were writing it for. It took some mystery away.

To make a book convincing, it's less important that the right tree be in the right place than that the characters are emotionally real.

I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters - to make them personalities.

I can tell you that as a writer and as a reader, I regard character as king. Or queen. No matter how riveting the action or interesting the plot twists, if I don't feel like I'm meeting someone who feels real, I'm not going to be compelled to read further.

All characters come from people I know, but after the initial inspiration, I tend to modify the characters so they fit with the story.

I love to evoke the bones and meat and thoughts of characters.

I think, ultimately, if you create characters that people like and can relate to, your characters are grounded on a human level even if your cars are not.

Characters are not created on paper or laptop alone.

Providing accurate portrayals of characters is something I want to pay ample attention to.