Karan Mahajan Quotes

In my own writing, I think of myself as a realist who exaggerates a little.

I shy away from plot structure that depends on the characters behaving in ways that are going to eventually be explained by their childhood, or by some recent trauma or event. People are incredibly complicated. Who knows why they are the way they are?

Unlike novels with a hero or two heroines, in 'One Amazing Thing,' all the characters tell stories they've never told anyone before, so all the voices become equally important.

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

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character.

What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.

'The Last Of Us,' to me, is just amazing storytelling, because everything's from the character point of view, which even movies don't really do successfully a lot of the time.

First person allows deeper insight into the protagonist's character. It allows the reader to identify more fully with the protagonist and to share her world quite intimately. So it suits a story focused on one character's personal journey. However, first person shuts out insights into other characters.

I'm not first and foremost interested in story and the what-happens, but I'm interested in who's telling it and how they're telling it and the effects of whatever happened on the characters and the people.

I think conflicted characters are always more interesting.

You have to add some sort of dimension to each of your characters because everyone has their own layers.

I think you approach a part the same way and just find out in what's making them tick and who they are. In a movie like this you may have a little less time and few dialogue scenes and exposition scenes for your character to really get that across, and so I wanted to be able to convey that she's not somebody who's just punching a clock but she has this weird emotional investment in her job to where she does get quite myopic and that's what makes her relentless.

Writers interest me for their style, their obsessions, the ways in which they approach the world.

It's always fun to layer a character, to make the character a little bit more dynamic than it is on paper.

Whatever the case, oftentimes, for a story to feel complete to me, I need more than one point of view.

I could watch 'There Will Be Blood' all day long, and Daniel Plainview is a terrible person - but he's still compelling to watch. That's what makes me want to engage and see what happens next.

I like to describe my characters as though they were all trapped in a glass box.

It's not easy trying to get into the psyche and behaviour patterns, which are far removed from one's own personality. Some intense characters linger long after it's over on screen.

I think that, every individual you invent in narrative work, you have to have some root in who that person is. That may be an aspect of yourself; it may be an aspect of something that you like, that you don't like. It may be an aspect that you wish you had. Maybe something you admire in another person.

Great novels have great characterization no matter what. But multiple points of view let me examine characters from entirely different perspectives, allowing me to learn more about everyone in the process.

I don't want to make fictional characters who are perfect - that's a vanilla situation - but the fact is you are allowed to more carefully select and curate what it is you're going to explore.

There is nothing like being able to develop a three-dimensional character over a long period of time. Sometimes you aren't able to fully portray a character because you only have a couple of scenes to do it in, and you don't get the full life and background of that character.

I feel, in drama, you don't need to be fed everything. Even though sometimes when you watch, you want to know what happened and you want to see it, I feel like sometimes it's so much stronger to see the effects that those actions have had.

I name the genre that I write in as 'novel of voices.'

Dialogue's a method of revelation, of course. A few words of dialogue can reveal worlds about a character.