Geraldine Brooks Quotes

For me, plot always comes out of character, so I had to be sure of my characters.

You've got to leave the reader with more than just a name and a costume - they need to know who the character is, what they're like, what kind of attitude they have, what sort of role they play.

Characters are incredibly important, but I tend to build them around the plot during the outline stage. However, once I'm writing the manuscript, the characters I'm writing dictate how the plot unfolds.

Sometimes I know what my characters are moving away from or toward; more often I just wait and see. For instance, though I knew Sinkler in 'The Trusty' was going for water, I did not know that he would meet a fetching young farm wife until I got him into her front yard.

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.

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

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character.

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

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.

Stories are important, but I'm really into characters, and if you can give birth to a good one, that's true success.

When it comes to a character, I make sure that it adds to the plot.

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.

As an author you hope your characters have sparks but truly in the end they have minds of their own!

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

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.

Because characters are your creations, you are the one who ultimately gets to decide their fate.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

I think it's important that a director be able to know his characters inside and out.

I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.

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

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

It is a wonderful thing in the process of writing when such paper characters are first sketched, and, when one is doing good work, from a certain point in time they come alive and start contradicting the author as well.

An author's characters do what he wants them to do.