Guy Gavriel Kay Quotes

My only conclusion about structure is that nothing works if you don't have interesting characters and a good story to tell.

Whenever you can manoeuvre your characters into a situation where they both have a good argument to make, you're on the right track.

Producing is figuring out how to make each character have a distinct voice, how to make the story twist and turn - that's the biggest challenge.

Whether you're writing a horror show or a James Bond film, I think what bubbles beneath is interesting characterization. The colors that emerge through storytelling is what a dramatist does. There's always got to be something bubbling underneath that will erupt at some point.

If you know exactly what your character knows, it's a drama.

It's people politics, people dynamics that make a show really good, whether it's 'Desperate Housewives' or 'Lost' or 'The Sopranos.' It's the people we've grown to love or otherwise.

It is a wonderful thing in the process of writing when such paper characters are first sketched, and, when one is doing good work, from a certain point in time they come alive and start contradicting the author as well.

I can move my characters through it easily, because I understand the background; I've really studied it.

You just drop a character like this that and the other and it's done.

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

It's really about, oh come on, this guy wouldn't say that or he wouldn't do that, you know, it's about the characters, about the story, about the situation.

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.'

'Ender's Game' has fabulous opportunities for spectacle, where appropriate, but there's also a tremendous central character. It's a balance.

For me, emotion comes first. If I have to change a scene, invent a scene, change dialogue, or put Graff by the lake in order to feel that dynamic, and the end results feels like 'Ender's Game,' then hopefully it works.

I tend to write one character at a time. But I don't write the entirety of one character at a time.

So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.

In judging other people's work, particularly short stories, I have noticed how novice writers tell the readers everything about their characters in the first paragraphs, disclose their motives, reveal their recent activities and their future intentions.

Characters are the key to a good book. It took me several novels to comprehend that.

It's necessary to track characters all the way through an opera. If you're dealing with more than one or two characters, it's very easy to forget that the others have lives of their own that feed into the story.

You asked what is the secret of a really good sketch. And it is a sketch is a small play. It's got a beginning, and a middle and an end. It should have a plot; it should have the characters, conflict. It is a little play. And in it, will be funny stuff.

First and foremost, I consider myself a storyteller. And I'm endlessly fascinated with people, with what they do and why... and how they feel about it. Which means I'm interested in romance fiction. I was drawn to it, as both a reader and a writer, at the very beginning of my career. It's my kind of storytelling.

That's one of those things that will really hurt me personally, if I label a character or think about what it might do if it were to do well. I just try to do a good job with it.

I consider plot a necessary intrusion on what I really want to do, which is write snappy dialogue.

One of the ways my first novel failed was that I was too in love with my characters.

Variety of characters and themes bring out the best in me.