Miranda July Quotes

I very much write from characters. Those people start speaking, and then I have them in the house with me and I live with them. Then at some point, it's time to get them out of the house. You can only live with someone like Dr. Georgeous Teitelbaum from THE SISTERS ROSENSWEIG for so long, and then it's time for her to go. But it is very like having the company of these people and trying to craft them in some way into a story.

Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.

I write about relationships and I try to create real-life characters.

I try to create new characters in each book I write. That's what makes writing fun and interesting for me.

When you write a novel you have to live with the characters for a long time. So I prefer short stories. I never wrote anything more than 250 pages.

I have no idea and I think Steven King strongest suit is the characters that he does create, all in the same area where he lives. The way he describes them is one of his fortes and it boggles my mind how he's able to do that and to create so many. It must be thousands by now.

The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.

People are always thinking that I'm the main character in my books, but each one has been different, and sometimes they've been men.

I am also working on a couple of short stories for anthologies. This is new to me and I'm enjoying it.

Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.

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 don't have a clear biography of my own that I could recount in an interesting way. I'm made up of the characters that I pulled out of my head, that I invented.

When I write, I never think of segments as chapters; I think of them as scenes. I always visualize them in my mind. Then I try to get the scene down on paper as closely as I can. That's the one thing that readers don't see - what you have in your mind. The reader can only see what you get on the page.

All a writer's characters are imaginary, no matter whether they are based on real people or not. They are people as one imagines them to be.

I love the idea of directing, I'm not confident enough, but I'm more confident in, well, I'd love to write. I've sort of written my whole life and I think I have a knack for it, so I'd like to write something and see what people think and that would be my first step to directing.

What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.

When I'm writing novels, even screenplays, it's never an actor I have in mind; it's always the version in my head of who the character is. Once somebody gets cast, I have to adjust a little bit to who they are.

Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.

The older I get and the more fiction I write, the more I outline, the more I think about plot before I dive in and plunge too far.

I really become the characters when I'm writing them. I'll become one or two of them more than others, I'm consistent that way.

I think writer is a word without gender, and a good writer observes, absorbs, hopefully empathizes then translates that into character and story. You don’t have to do or be or have experienced, traveled to, but you have to imagine all of that, very well–and believe it completely during the bubble of the work.

I like to make all my characters interesting. Be they male, female or creatures unknown.

I like the discipline of writing a script. You can't go into the character's head - you have to find these creative ways to help externalize what they're thinking.

You're responsible for your own character to a degree, because when it comes to the final draft of the script, you might say, "Well, I think maybe I could add this here, add that there." But I find that I write just as well for the other characters as I do for myself. I think.

Once you have your character sitting right there in your head, all you really need to do is wind them up, put them down, and simply write down what they do, say, or think.