Mark Waid Quotes

If you know your characters well enough, you aren't trying to grasp for storylines. You're really thinking about their flaws and their passions and what they're chasing.

Whether you're writing a horror show or a James Bond film, I think what bubbles beneath is interesting characterization. The colors that emerge through storytelling is what a dramatist does. There's always got to be something bubbling underneath that will erupt at some point.

You've either got to find a way to make your continuing characters insteresting without making them maudlin or overwrought, or you've got to put more emphasis on the suspects.

I love storytelling. I love characters that are complicated and layered, real people, that you see why they do what they do.

The emotions of the actors are better when they understand the chronological factors that are adding to the story.

I once took a workshop with Jim Shepard, and he has this term, 'rate-of-revelation,' that has come to mean a lot to me: 'the pace at which we're learning crucial emotional information about the stories' central figures.' An ever-increasing rate-of-revelation is good; a stagnant r-of-r is not.

We always try to go back to character: What do they want? What are they doing? What's in motion that they're dealing with? When things get particularly heavy, we will take a step back and look at who has some room to have some things lighter, funnier, or sweeter happen.

I really think if you take away a character's obstacles then there's no comedy.

I like having a plot; I like characters with a reason to get up in the morning.

All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.

I'm all about the story. If I like the character and I think the story's entertaining, I'll do it.

Character development is conflict.

I try to stay away from stuff that's just action, action, action, action, action, and you kind of fast-forward through the dialogue scenes. I'm not interested in doing that. Give me a reason to fight, and I'll go there. But don't just make it, 'You touched my pen! Haaa-yah!' I've done that before.

I feel like having details from their day and having a plot and action and things to do is much more revealing than having a character sitting and thinking to themselves. When I'm writing, I want people to actually have a goal, something that's dragging them forward.

I enjoy pushing my characters to the limit. No matter how far out there I go, I look for things that make the characters human.

In order to deliver the emotional truth in the story, you have to include some of the literal truth.

You need characters who want things. They want love, they want recognition, they want happiness.

I've always loved shows that combine both approaches - that have a mythology and a set of characters, whose stories develop and change, and where the relationships evolve and fracture.

If you give a character room to breathe, they come alive.

I think it is important that you care about the characters, and you are not just waiting for the next action sequence but have a vested interested in what happens to them.

You know, the point of a novel - or to me, the point of a novel, the gift of a novel is to go really deeply inside people's lives and inside their personal experiences.

But I also wanted to give them an intelligent emotional journey, without having to suspend reality - to be able to look at those characters and see reasons for the relationships and why what happens happens.

When you've got good writing, you can kind of give up all the research, in a way, and start just following the emotional integrity of the journey of your character.

To make a book convincing, it's less important that the right tree be in the right place than that the characters are emotionally real.

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.