Amber Benson Quotes

The first job of a storyteller is to make the reader feel the story, to get the reader to live in the skin of the character.

I think the key is to give the reader characters they not only care about, but identify with, and to never take away all hope.

I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.

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.

I think it's very easy to disgust the reader with violence on the page - that's incredibly easy - but it's far harder to make a reader care about a character.

If there is any secret to my success, I think it's that my characters are very real to me. I feel everything they feel, and therefore I think my readers care about them.

I've always been interested in films where you can identify with the actors. Where you can be in their shoes and therefore be more involved if they're people that you recognize.

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

The idea that people in novels should be more sympathetic than people in life simply baffles me.

I'm just looking for touching characters.

You want to feel that your reader does identify with the characters so that there's a real entry into the story - that some quality speaks to the individual.

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.

To read a character I'm not sympathizing with is generally quite a good, attractive proposition because I've got somewhere to go, I've got work to do, to try to understand why they behave like they behave, to relate entirely and understand them and to be completely emotionally connected. That is much more fun 99 percent of the time.

I try to make the readers feel they've lived the events of the book. Just as you grieve if a friend is killed, you should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care. If somebody dies and you just go get more popcorn, it's a superficial experience isn't it?

Now, I admire The Sims as a game, but from a story viewpoint, there are two glaring problems. First, your relationship with those characters is like they're bugs in a jar. There's no empathy. And secondly, you've got this clunky, chemistry-set interface between you and them, with bars to show how tired or angry they are. It's all tell not show.

When I'm writing from a character's viewpoint, in essence I become that character; I share their thoughts, I see the world through their eyes and try to feel everything they feel.

I go to great lengths to make certain situations feel right to the reader.

I believe that if writers want their readers to care about a character, they have to care themselves. I have to root for a detective who screws up as much as Thorne does, who shares my birthday, my North London stomping ground, and my love of country music, both alt and cheesy.

The easiest way for readers to connect with characters and feel sympathy is to make the character entertaining, sympathetic and likeable.

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.

It would be hard to play a character you don't like - for me anyway - or can't find something in them to like.

I've had a couple of people come up to me after screenings and say they kind of sympathized with the character. I always get a kick out of it when people say that. It means I did something maybe a little bit to the credit of the character.

Any narrative, whether it's fiction or not, you have to approach it as though it really happened to you. I think that's the only way to get inside the characters and make the narrative work. It's a storytelling tradition, and I think to come off as genuine then you have to really approach it that way.

I think there has to be an empathic strike between the reader and the protagonist. There has to be something said or known that connects the reader to this person you're going to ride through the story with.

You want the audience to be in the character's shoes. The more deeply into the character's shoes the audience is, the more they're going to care about what's going on.