Emma Healey Quotes

I like to think I put some of myself in every character.

I don't believe you just create a character out of thin air, there's always something of yourself you bring.

I'm a big believer in writing really good dialogue.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

For me, the dialogue is the easiest part of writing. It just always seems so obvious what a character will say. Maybe it's because I talk too much!

I have no particular reader in mind, but a passionate desire to tell an honest, moving story.

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

When I'm writing a story, which takes me a year or more, I can feel my character living with me - they're responding to whatever funny, familial, or social situation I'm in, and I think about their responses constantly.

The hardest thing to teach young writers is that it's wonderful to tell your truth. And that's what you should do. But it damn well better be beautiful.

I sort of like writing about weird characters, I guess.

Part of me becomes the characters I'm writing about. I think readers feel like they are there, the way I am, as a result.

What I look for in any character, good or bad, is whether I can hear him speak. If I can imagine him that clearly, then I can write about him.

I have the power to write these books where I invent characters that I really like, and it gets to come out the way they want it to come out, and I get to make it happen.

If I don't fall in love with my characters, I cannot shoot.

I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you're going to write them convincingly.

I think of myself as a storyteller, and that is it.

All I can guess is that when I write, I forget that it's not real. I'm living the story, and I think people can read that sincerity about the characters. They are real to me while I'm writing them, and I think that makes them real to the readers as well.

Many people have told me that my books read like novels. Perhaps this is because, when I write, I feel I am really there, so strong is my feeling for my subject. On occasion, I have been so moved by the events I have been describing that I have felt like crying.

When you have a character to work with, you carry them around in a strange way - they make you look at the world in a different way.

Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.

I want to have compassion for my characters - I feel like I am the characters when I'm writing them.

Fiction is all about vicarious experiences and getting into other people's heads in a way that no other art form lets you.

Once I started to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I just let them start talking.

When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.