Nicholas Lea Quotes

What helps writers, and ultimately, obviously, helps the actors - who should serve the words that the writer puts on the page - is if the character has damages, because then the writers can cultivate and excavate, like a dentist going into a tooth.

Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there.

Often the starting point for characters, for me, is finding a little, most minor detail, and I'll go from there.

This may sound strange, but although I feel like I know everything about my characters, the brand of shampoo they use, how many cavities they have, their greatest fear, I don't actually see their faces.

The thing with videogame characters is that they tend to be really undercooked, and people don't take the time to really flesh them out. They don't treat them with the respect that a writer writing characters in any other medium would treat their character.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

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

For every book that I write... I develop a history for each person and make sure they are well rounded and flawed. You have to know everything about them from their shoe size, to where they went to school, to what their first pet was, to what they like to eat, to what they want out of life.

The most I could hope for is to come and try and develop a character who is interesting, who is interesting to me, who is interesting to fans and who could contribute to the storytelling that is 'Law & Order: SVU.'

I've always wanted my characters to have more dimension and realistic cores than the ingenue material often provides. It's been a challenge.

'Longmire' is more of a show about the characters, and you couldn't pay a bigger compliment than to want to know more about my character, or the characters on the show.

I try to begin with a strong grasp of my characters. Even if it's schematic, I need it clear in my head who these people are.

A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat.

When you get into a film, it is one story and one set development of a character, and you are able to delve into one character for a short period of time and discover everything about them.

I like to take a character and develop it.

You always have to create the character from the ground up.

I'm about my characters.

I always look for interesting, complex characters. You know, interesting, well-written material.

What I'm really trying to do is create unique characters.

Most of my films have a lot of character development and exploration, whereas in most horror movies the characters are just cardboard.

You have to start from a place of trying to create a character.

When you begin a play, you're going to have to spend a lot of time with those characters, so those characters are going to have to be rich enough that you want to take a very long journey with them. That's how I begin thinking about what I want to write about and who I want to write about.

To me, the struggle is to try to make a less-well-written or less-well-rounded character and find who they are. If you really get it, and it's all on the page, then it's really just gonna pop out at you.

When you create a character, you create it for yourself - you do whatever you want. It's your job to explore it in as many different avenues as you can in order to make it a fully wounded character.

It's always nice to do the flashbacks. That's what's so great about 'Scandal' is that we get to do flashbacks and then keep figuring out and discovering more things about our characters that make them fuller.