Beth Gutcheon Quotes

You can't judge your characters or otherwise; it's not about you, it's about them.

Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.

It's hard to know whether certain characters come to life or not, they either come to have their own life or they don't. I've written many things in which the characters just remain inert.

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.

I try not to identify too strongly with any of my characters. I like to stand back and see them objectively. I think this is why I often use boys instead of girls, just in case I get too close and lose the overall picture.

Writers often say that characters begin to write themselves, and I never used to believe that. I always thought that was complete hogwash.

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

I become my characters, and then try to allow events in the story to take their own course. I try not to play God, but to let them work out their own destiny.

I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.

My first job is to write the characters as full and authentic people as well as I can.

I always say I write my own novels and the characters don't take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, 'What is he or she like,' and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.

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.

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.

Once you start writing a character visually, you're in trouble.

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

I liked 35 and in both my novels that is the age of the lead characters. I tried making them my age but they just seemed to keep moaning about stuff.

When I was in college, I had the good fortune to have Joyce Carol Oates as my writing teacher. She told me that I could take an aspect of myself, and from that one bit of personality, I can create a character. This is what I have done, particularly in my novels.

All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.

I love making characters real and believable, through my own experience and choices.

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

Characters are the key to a good book. It took me several novels to comprehend that.

I always talk about my characters like they're real people.

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'

There are two different ways of writing a novel. The first I call the traditional father way, when the novelist slightly situates himself or herself above the text and knows what each and every character is going to do. It's a bit like engineering. I've never felt close to that tradition. I like the second way, which relies a bit more on intuition.

Early on in the writing, there is often a sentence that pins down a character for me.