Steve Erickson Quotes

How I work is I work from of very character-driven place. And I trust the writers.

At the end of the day, it's really, really difficult to make a brand-new show, to write a pilot where you have to introduce characters and everyone has to kind of be dynamic and have something different for themselves.

I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.

Characters are incredibly important, but I tend to build them around the plot during the outline stage. However, once I'm writing the manuscript, the characters I'm writing dictate how the plot unfolds.

When you have really good writing, you're compelled by the actors who are in it, and you may think it's the actors or the design or the filmmaking of it, but then you're like, 'Well, the base is a really rich story that these guys have created.'

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

For me, plot always comes out of character, so I had to be sure of my characters.

As far as the creative side, the more I do this, the more I know that it's all about the writing. We don't always celebrate that enough, but without the writing, you can't do much. You got on a film sometimes, and it's sort of half-written, and they expect and think that the actor's job is to bring the extra part and the good part. It's not.

Most of my films have been very character driven.

As an actor, I give 60 days to act in a film, but the writer takes nearly two to three years to create a story.

It always comes down to script and characters.

I have no problems or issues with screenwriting in general.

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

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

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

My books are character-driven. They're not driven by the story.

The head writer loves that my character is a boor.

The instant that movies became described as character driven was the instant when characters stopped mattering in movies. In other words, the birth of the notion of the character-driven movie coincided with the birth of movies in which characters were incidental to the very activities in which they engaged.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

As a writer, all you want to do is write for great actors. That's all.

When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.

That's the way it happens - some characters you set out to use, some are happy accidents. As long as it works, it doesn't really matter how you got them.

I usually don't find myself reacting to my characters. I just create them ... And let the audience decide whether they're empathetic or scared or compelled to cheer me on.