Tom King Quotes

I always find stuff in my characters to relate to.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

There are bits of me in all my characters.

There is always going to be a little bit of me in each character.

But I always need to identify with a character to write about him or her - and by 'identify,' I mean see the world through that person's eyes and have a strong sense of the inner logic of their acts and decisions, wacky or wrongheaded though they might be. In that sense, I think there's some of me in all of them.

I do not believe that with a fictional character you can force yourself too far away from yourself. There has to be some of you in it.

In all my characters, I try to find an iota of myself, and in Castle, I found a lot. He gets away with a lot, so that's fun.

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

I put a lot of myself into my characters when I write.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

To write convincingly, I think you must be able to relate, in some way, to what a character is experiencing.

It's always hard for a writer to make herself into a character; I had to figure out what my defining characteristics were, and that's something I had to work through multiple drafts to figure out.

It's easier to cast yourself in something you've written because you know your voice.

There's some of me in all my characters.

There are fragments of me in all my characters.

That's the novelist's job: to peel back the layers and look underneath.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

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.

I want to wake up one morning and know how to write page one, or page 10, or page 250. But I never seem to know how to do it. Every book is different and takes a different structure, style, process, etc. And relearning how to write is where the insanity comes from.

Oh how I wish I could be as obsessive as Carrie from 'Homeland' when I'm writing a book! That would save me a lot of trouble during the revision process.

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

If there is any secret to my success, I think it's that my characters are very real to me. I feel everything they feel, and therefore I think my readers care about them.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I will pick and choose.