JoBeth Williams Quotes

The idea behind 'Gloria' was to take a secondary character - the aunt, the mother - and stay with her as she becomes our protagonist.

One pleasure of working on a trilogy is watching characters warp and grow over time.

I tend to relate to a character in terms of the arc: what's interesting is where he starts versus where he ends up.

You don't want a character who sits on an even playing field the whole time.

I like books that have razor-sharp plotting that snaps and moves along. It's not about the main character being different at the end. I don't want my main character to be different in the end. I still want him committed to his ideas, to be steadfast, true and loyal.

I've never read a script in which you are actively pulling for the protagonist in the beginning, but little by little, you lose that.

In 'Hollow City,' I'm taking all the characters out of the lives they've been secure in for years and plunging them into the unknown. That's how you really get to know them.

As you do on any cable series, if they introduce you as the villain, then you better start working towards making him a really good guy, or if they introduce you as a really good guy, then you better start working towards being the villain. Your character has to go somewhere, or else they become very uninteresting.

Main characters should grow and change during the course of a story.

Drama comes from characters changing. If characters stay the same and nothing changes, there's really nothing to look at.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

In the 'Buffy' room, it was never about a plot twist, ever. It was always about, 'Tell the story, tell the characters, complicate their lives, make things get worse,' but we never worked backwards from the plot, and it was always a great lesson.

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

I'm not sure Kinsey has changed in these first twelve books. I think the reader learns more about her, but from Kinsey's perspective, only three years have passed while the rest of us have been getting older at a much faster clip.

Every film you're commissioned to write is all about an arc; usually, the arc is that the world creates a change in the character, usually for the better. To not have an arc, the messages and ideas in the film became more prominent.

One of the ways that you reveal character is by getting a character into a situation and seeing what they do.

Film is so much to do with perfection and how differently you can feel about someone at the beginning of the film and the end of the film.

I've often said the reader knows every bit as much about Thorne as I do. When I created him for 'Sleepyhead,' I was determined he should be a character who would develop, book by book, change and grow as we all do, and who - crucially - would be unpredictable.

The day a character becomes predictable is the day a writer should think about moving on - because the reader certainly will.

It interests me to imagine characters shifting from one situation and one location to another for whatever the circumstances may be.

At the heart of every story is conflict - whether external or internal, make it a good one, and remember that this problem is going to shape your character, leaving her forever changed.

I think everybody goes through changes, and the same should be said for fictional characters, especially ones that you follow on television.

Every actor wants to have a character that changes, that has some kind of movement, that gets from point A to point B, that doesn't just supply one note.

In TV, you may think your character's one thing for two episodes, and then the third episode it could be something different.

There's something pretty awesome about staying with a character and growing.