Noah Baumbach Quotes

People like the comedy more when they care about the characters.

I believe the most intricate plot won't matter much to readers if they don't care about the characters, especially in a series. So I try to focus hard on making each character, whether villain or hero, have an interesting flaw that readers can relate to.

If you have great characters, then your reader becomes emotionally invested in those people.

Every character comes with its own challenges.

As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.

My books are primarily plot driven but the best plot in the world is useless if you don't populate them with characters that readers can care about.

The characters are always the focal point of a book for me, whether I'm writing or reading. I may enjoy a book that has an intriguing mystery or a good plot, but to become one of my real favorites, it has to have great characters.

You have to create characters - certainly in series TV - who people engage with. They don't have to be nice; you don't have to agree with them. But they do have to be compulsively watchable and believable and human, and you want to know what happens to them.

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.

There's a horrible fallacy that exists in the popular discussion of fiction these days: the idea that a successful central character need be 'likeable' or 'sympathetic'. It is surely more important that they be human, no? More crucial that they breathe?

I, as a fan of numerous TV shows and movies, know that people mess up. The characters that we love are not always going to act in the ways that we want them to. That's what makes them interesting.

If you write fiction, you have to love your characters. It's like your family. You don't have to like them, but you have to love them.

All my characters have been relatable.

What makes an audience watch something and care about the characters is the emotional life of the characters.

Usually the characters are where I start. Then I continually ask myself, 'What's the worst thing that could happen to this character?'

One of the things that separates a good genre movie from a bad genre movie, I always think, ironically, is when you care about the people. The dime a dozen ones are where you don't have any awareness of the character.

You decide which characters you want and then do the best you can to bring their humanity to the forefront in the context that you place them in - the crises in which you've placed them.

A friend of mine who is in the publishing business knew I was writing a book, and he said, 'Have you said anything yet about the good guy? Because I know you spend so much time with the bad guys.' Because they're fun. So then you have to make the good guy fun, in order to compete. That's the challenge.

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.

I usually start with a repulsive character and go on from there.

You treat characters like people you meet in life-friends or mentors.

I'm drawn particularly to stories that evolve out of the character of the protagonist.

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.'

If you can't laugh at your own characters, or shed a tear for them, or even get angry at one of them, no one else will either.

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.