Winnie Holzman Quotes

In all my characters, I try to find an iota of myself, and in Castle, I found a lot. He gets away with a lot, so that's fun.

I've written short stories from male perspectives before, and I've never had a problem with it as long as I've understood the character's emotions and motivations.

The great thing about writing is that you always put yourself in the shoes of the character. If you're doing it right, you can see into the heart of all your characters. Usually, when there's a writing problem, it's because you aren't doing that.

I always find stuff in my characters to relate to.

You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you're a writer.

I don't have to live the lives of my characters to write about them. It's about really putting yourself in their shoes.

If I don't fall in love with my characters, I cannot shoot.

But I always need to identify with a character to write about him or her - and by 'identify,' I mean see the world through that person's eyes and have a strong sense of the inner logic of their acts and decisions, wacky or wrongheaded though they might be. In that sense, I think there's some of me in all of them.

Everything I learned as an actor, I have basically applied to writing.

Part of being a fiction writer is being able to imagine how someone else is thinking and feeling. I think I've always been good at that.

To write convincingly, I think you must be able to relate, in some way, to what a character is experiencing.

To get a connection to your characters, you have to put them in a situation that you can feel yourself.

You can start imagining all kinds of things characters would feel, but you have to have a sense of whether those imaginings might be right.

Real acting is about giving people an insight into a person, letting the audience in.

I do feel like that's what a writer does, is he goes into other people's heads.

I don't ever really know where I get my characters from.

The interesting thing about fiction from a writer's standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you.

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

I always believed in my characters. I lived them.

I just love to be able to actually build a character.

I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with.

Sometimes a character is really based on research that you do. Other times it's just based on your imagination or perhaps your conversation with the director. Or sometimes all of the above. It depends on the movie and character.

As a writer, it's a great narrative tool to have that character who is slightly detached but at the same time observant of his reality, because I think that's pretty much what being a writer is - being there, watching and internalizing.

A good journalist, as you know, is a great listener. And so's a good writer. And I got to listen to people for almost 20 years. That serves me well, I hope, when I try to understand how a character might be feeling, or how they might react.

When you write, you hear the characters speaking to you as you take dictation from what they say. And obviously, they had particular personalities when you hear them.