Abi Morgan Quotes

As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.

If you have great characters, then your reader becomes emotionally invested in those people.

If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.

The first thing, when I read the script, is that I need to care about what happens and feel compelled by the story and engaged by the characters. It needs to resonate with me, even if what the characters are going through is not something that I have experienced in my life. I have to feel like it has some sort of meaning to me.

If you're not connected emotionally to a story, then you're dead. You're really just opening the door for people to lose interest and their minds to wander, for them to start picking it apart.

Big stories need human stakes.

It's hard to be scared if you don't feel for a character, because you don't care if they die or live.

You can't make the audience fall in love with a character you don't like.

My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me, if that makes any sense.

One of the things that happens when you write characters - and maybe this is my own sentimentality - is that I always find I have an instinct to protect them.

I'm focused on finding characters I connect to.

You have to be involved and relate to the characters in order to make a film that is true emotionally.

One of the things that separates a good genre movie from a bad genre movie, I always think, ironically, is when you care about the people. The dime a dozen ones are where you don't have any awareness of the character.

If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.

People like the comedy more when they care about the characters.

If you can't laugh at your own characters, or shed a tear for them, or even get angry at one of them, no one else will either.

Sympathetic characters usually have a voice. They usually don't have any trouble being heard.

I think you have to love the characters that you write. I don't know how you could possibly write a TV show where you didn't love the characters.

I'm always sorry to finish a book, to let go of characters I love, people I've struggled to understand for years, people who evolve before me.

I think it is important that you care about the characters, and you are not just waiting for the next action sequence but have a vested interested in what happens to them.

When a script moves me, I find that I immediately understand a character. Of course not completely, but I do understand.

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

If the characters are compelling, readers will follow anywhere.

I am a firm believer that a good plot makes for a fun enough read, but it's not what binds us. If we don't care about the characters, we won't care - not in a lasting way - about what's happening to them.

Besides the mistakes that are pointed out, I love the way readers become involved with the characters. When readers start asking about character motivations instead of concentrating on the special effects, it means you're connecting with them on a personal level.