Jennifer Donnelly Quotes

I don't think you can teach someone how to come up with good characters or a story.

I like to make all my characters interesting. Be they male, female or creatures unknown.

When I start writing a new imaginary future, I have no idea what it is. The characters arrive first. They help me figure out where they are living and I get to fill in the gaps with that and where we are. So when I get to the end of the process of composition, if I feel that I have really done my job, I have no idea what I've got - and I then spend essentially the rest of my life figuring out what it might mean.

There's a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I'm writing a character where I put myself in their place.

There were [in Wilson] a lot of clues in it that you don't normally get, you know, normally you use your imagination or whatever, you get some clues in the script, of course, but yeah, it was really helpful, and I really like the graphic novel. There's stuff in there, there's a couple things in there I really wanted to use that they couldn't get in the movie, but it's definitely, he's a unique guy, you know, I never read a character like this before.

Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters.

Sometimes I create a character from a scrap - a mere mention that has been left behind.

If I write a character, instead of looking from the outside, like maybe a journalist would, trying to describe them physically and figuring out what kind of things they might be interested in or have in their house, I don't really do it that way. I try to feel what it would be like to be inside this person, to be them.

For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.

I've been inspired by dreams - I've even stolen scenes or images or characters from them.

I write to be the characters that I am not.

The idea for a novel is like a little tiny fire in a dark night. And, one by one, the characters come and stand around it and warm their hands.

GOOD AS NEW was born out of the idea of writing a play where the stakes were high and the collisions were of a verbal nature. Also I wanted to write a play where people were smarter than I was, and more alive than I feel normally. I became interested in the idea of characters who would surprise me. I guess one could argue that nothing comes out of you that wasn't within you to begin with, but maybe there are ways to trick yourself into becoming more an observer or an advocate for the characters.

o matter how much research you do, or invention you do, whether it's a character from a novel, a completely invented character or someone who actually existed, it's a work of faction. By the very fact you only have an hour and a half or two hours to tell a story, you're telescoping events and it is, in the end, a work of imagination.

The inspiration really comes first from the character and the story. That vision of what the story is, and what the character is, the world that they inhabit and what the story wants to tell. That's really what inspires me.

What I try to do in writing any character is to put myself in his position.

My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them.

The illusion of control has to be there, but mostly I'm following characters and the consequences of their own decisions, because a lot of the time they made decisions about what to do or how to behave that I had no idea were coming down the pike. As I would sit and try to inhabit a character, they themselves in my imagination would have quite a bit of free will.

The best character types are the ones you can be creative with and totally delve into...

I think at some level, it's just alchemy that we, as writers, can't explain when we write the characters. I don't set out to create the characters - they're not, to me, collections of quirks that I can put together. I discover the characters, instead. I usually go through a standard set of interview questions with the character in the beginning and ask the vital stuff: What's important to you? What do you love? Hate? Fear? .. and then I know where to start. But the characters just grow on their own, at a certain point. And start surprising me.

When I'm writing, I don't put faces on the characters. When I finish the first draft of the script, I start visualizing, and sometimes then I think about one actor.

I sat and thought for four (delayed train) hours, and all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn't know he was a wizard became more and more real to me.

I think I was probably able to flip characters in my head as if I was playing different roles in order to write the different people because you kind of have to be one person, and inhabit him and write from his voice and be her and write her voice. So I think that helped.

Theater is the best. That's where you get the work done. You just really get in there and figure something out about a story or a character or life or the world. That's where magic stuff happens.

Once you have your character sitting right there in your head, all you really need to do is wind them up, put them down, and simply write down what they do, say, or think.