Cliff Chiang Quotes

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

Big stories need human stakes.

To connect with the characters, you need to connect with the world. If the world feels vaguely familiar, I believe the characters will feel relatable.

You need the audience to become invested in the characters and in order to become invested, they need to identify with the characters... and that's why the characters need to be real.

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

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

Audiences need to engage with characters.

I hope to create characters that people want to watch - and they either want to be or are, or it's something that they recognize.

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.

There's no rule that we have to like the characters movies are about.

I care about all the characters I play, and I get quite defensive about them.

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.

Readers embrace all kinds of characters as long as they are written with emotional truth.

And the most important thing - apart from telling a good, believable story, and being a true character - is to be someone the audience will care about, even if you're playing a murderer or rapist.

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.

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

A lot of entertainment, and especially in a half-hour format, can be all jokes, all the time. And some of those jokes can be really, really funny, but what I respond to, as a viewers, is identification or caring about the characters.

When a family film is done well, there's a character that every member of the audience can relate to. I want to be one of those guys.

The real trick to these movies and making the big action sequences work - and I've forgotten this sometimes and screwed it up - the characters really have to be humanized. Because you can have the greatest special effects in the world, but if you don't care about the people in those effects, there's no impact.

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

Certain characters get to me and stay with me for a while.

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 present characters an audience can relate to.