Joanna Scott Quotes

My books are character-driven. They're not driven by the story.

Whenever people say they didn't like the main character of a book, they mean they didn't like the book. The main character has to be a friend? I don't get that.

I tend to write one character at a time. But I don't write the entirety of one character at a time.

One thing George R. R. Martin does is surprising things to main characters. But he says so himself.

I love acting, and ultimately all my characters are very different, and each character I love in a different way.

Your opening should give the reader a person to focus on. In a short story, this person should turn up almost immediately; he should be integral to the story's main action; he should be an individual, not just a type. In a novel, the main character may take longer to appear: Anna Karenina doesn't show up in her own novel until chapter eighteen.

How I work is I work from of very character-driven place. And I trust the writers.

I never really thought about what characters I play. I always just wanted different characters.

In a lot of cases, writers discover that the novel needs to begin later in the action than they'd first thought.

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

The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.

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

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 normally write in the first person, and my narrators are as real to me as any of the people I have worked with. They live and breathe in my imagination.

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character.

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

When I'm writing fiction, I'm sort of interested by the fact that somehow or other I can have the feeling of actually seeing things through someone else's eyes.

I enjoy the writing process and producing; I enjoy seeing an idea come to fruition. I'm driven by very complex characters. You look at the pilot of 'Breaking Bad,' where there's so much depth to the character, you can't help but be invested when you watch.

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.

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.

Especially when I write, I want to get out of people's heads and have them speak and have them get dressed and have them go to work.

People are always thinking that I'm the main character in my books, but each one has been different, and sometimes they've been men.

If you write a bunch of different characters with a bunch of different opinions, you end up with these long scenes of everyone standing around talking.

When I create characters, I create a world to inhabit and they begin to feel very real for me. I don't belong in a psych ward, I don't think, but they become very real, like my own family, and then I have to say goodbye, close the door, and work on other things.

A novel can do something that films and TV usually can't - a glimpse inside the characters' heads. I write very tight third person point of view, so the reader is right behind the eyes of each character, seeing what they see and feeling what they feel.