Chris Cleave Quotes

I spent some time, six months or so, ruminating about the characters before I sat down to write 'Faith'.

That's the way it happens - some characters you set out to use, some are happy accidents. As long as it works, it doesn't really matter how you got them.

I never have particular actors planned when I'm in the process of writing.

Anybody can do research. The plotting of the novel, writing the ending before you write anything else, which I always do - I don't know that everybody can do that. That's the hard part.

I do a lot better if I sit around and think about a character for a couple of months.

I work out the other bits, too, but I need to know what I look like, very early on. And then it's like a template; I'll fill that person out. If I get that out of the way, then I'm all right.

My writing process hasn't changed - it's is the same whether I'm working on a Y.A. novel or, as now, a new novel for adults. A lot of reading, a lot of research if the subject warrants it, a lot of sticky notes and scraps of paper - and get to work.

I don't ever really know where I get my characters from.

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.

When you write, you hear the characters speaking to you as you take dictation from what they say. And obviously, they had particular personalities when you hear them.

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

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

After a while, the characters I'm writing begin to feel real to me. That's when I know I'm heading in the right direction.

I'll often dream about characters before I start writing their stories.

I make a rod for my own back because people see my novels as quasi documentaries. But it is never history that's the main event of my books. It's my characters.

That balance between involvement and detachment is what novelists do. It's the ideal relationship between a novelist and a character, I think, total involvement and identity and empathy, stopping short of being autobiographical - in my case, anyway - but also quite detached.

When I'm writing a story, which takes me a year or more, I can feel my character living with me - they're responding to whatever funny, familial, or social situation I'm in, and I think about their responses constantly.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

I find it very hard to sit down and create an idea or especially a new character on command. Usually my characters evolve by accident out of some story context.

I think the idea of creating a character from scratch, one that has not been done in a novel or an existing story, is immensely exciting, terrifying and ultimately rewarding.

Very few of my characters are based on people I've known. It is too constricting.

As a writer, I always think about who my prototype actors are, in my brain. It's helpful, as a writer, to think about that.

I don't really set out to explore grand themes. I set out to tell a story. And one I have to be able to imagine right through.

What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.