Carl Hiaasen Quotes

Most of my films have been very character driven.

Characters are incredibly important, but I tend to build them around the plot during the outline stage. However, once I'm writing the manuscript, the characters I'm writing dictate how the plot unfolds.

My stories are character driven.

I'm always writing about character first. Plot, such as it is, comes from the characters.

In the 'Buffy' room, it was never about a plot twist, ever. It was always about, 'Tell the story, tell the characters, complicate their lives, make things get worse,' but we never worked backwards from the plot, and it was always a great lesson.

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

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'.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

If you know exactly what your character knows, it's a drama.

I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.

In 'Me Before You,' the two characters popped into my head fully formed, which is really strange and unusual. Other books, I sit on them for two or three months. I have a whole routine: I buy a nice book; I hand-write all their characteristics. I put them through little tests just to see how they would react to things.

I try to trace the connection between the characters and that way a story or plot emerges.

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

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

It's necessary to track characters all the way through an opera. If you're dealing with more than one or two characters, it's very easy to forget that the others have lives of their own that feed into the story.

For me, plot always comes out of character, so I had to be sure of my characters.

We don't experience our lives as plots. If I asked you to tell me what your last week was like, you're not really gonna give me plot. You're gonna give me sort of linked narrative. And I wanted to see how do we bring that into fiction without losing the reader.

My only conclusion about structure is that nothing works if you don't have interesting characters and a good story to tell.

It always comes down to script and characters.

For 'The Bestseller'... there was hardly any research, but I had to give each person a quirk and develop their stories so that it would relate to who they are.

I get very invested in characters; it's the only way I find that I can write a book and really make it work.

I write as if I'm someone reading the book - often people ask if I write one strand first and then go back and seed in the other, but I don't think I could keep track of who knows what, and the tension would come out wrong, so the answer is no - I write it more or less in the order you read it.

Plot is just not my gift. I'm fascinated with complex characters, and that doesn't mix well with complex plots. And by the way, when the plot is simple, you can move one piece around and make it feel fresh. Hell or High Water's a good example: I don't tell you why the brothers are robbing the bank.

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.