Emily Giffin Quotes

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

Most writers, I'm afraid, live very boring lives sitting in front of a screen. However, having said that: every writer puts a bit of themselves into the characters to bring them alive.

His soul is in his stories. I once asked him who inspired him to create his characters, and his answer was no one. That all his characters were himself.

One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.

I'm not in the business of meddling with people's destinies - and yes, my characters are real people to me. They have histories and thoughts and yearnings and hurts and misgivings and pleasures that don't belong to me.

I don't really base any of my characters on specific people that I know, although my characters are informed by the kind of people who live in my community.

I've never purposefully based a character on any one person I know, but I'm certain there are amalgamations that exist.

Every character I've had in my act - none of them have a similar creation story. I actually thought up Peanut and designed him in my head. I described him to a woman that was making soft puppets and she drew up some sketches. And the character came to be just because he popped into my head.

I'm not building each one character around one metaphor, so much as trying to build a heroic archetype that can be used to express the kind of metaphors that I find in each story.

I always begin with a character or characters, and then try to think up as much action for them as possible.

That's been my main interest for the last 15 years, is to really make sure the story and the characters take precedence over everything else, and that I give them everything I can to make them exist as actual people.

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.

I think once everything is in place, once you've kind of wrapped your head around the story and the character, it's very liberating and you can start doing things like you would do.

I do not put myself in a box and say, for instance, I'm writing post-colonial literature. I don't know what I'm writing. That's the business of professors and critics. My job is to tell a story, and that's it.

I think "honest" sometimes gets used to describe a real depiction of real life. I don't think that's necessarily what we're doing. We created these fake characters and we're just trying to figure out what they would do in situations they enter into.

I don't think you can teach someone how to come up with good characters or a story.

I have found that the characters in my novels stay with me after a book has ended. I know them in some sense. I never map anything out. I just think until I am secure in the voice of one of them, and then let the character unfold.

Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters.

Sometimes I'll be fifty, sixty pages into something and I'll still be calling a character "X." I don't have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don't want to leave them ever.

I'm not trying to convey a message, I'm just trying to tell a story.

In the writing phase, normally I try not to envisage any particular actors because I like to let the characters sort of reveal themselves in that process.

Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.

I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me.

My characters are usually composites. I wish I could pretend that I make up all of these characters, but no. I steal from people. But people will say to me, "Oh, that's me!" and I'm thinking, no, that's not you!

Maybe I'm perverse, but the question of "rooting" for a character, or setting out to write a character for whom other people will root, has never had anything to do with why I read or write fiction. As long as the writing and story remain alive, intense, invigorating, provoking, the characters can be as demonic or saintly as the author wants.