Terry McMillan Quotes

I don't do issue writing. I do character writing.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I'm about my characters.

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.

Given what I do to my characters, I'm not sure I'd want to meet any of them.

I don't need all that much - I just need to know who my characters are and what kind of jam they're going to get into, and I'll write myself out of their jam.

I put heavy emphasis on the characters.

Most of my films have been very character driven.

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.

The people I write are real to me, and basically, they tell me about their environments on a need-to-know basis.

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'.

This is the story, this is your character, I have the sense of the landscape, I have the sense of the scene, I have all that stuff. But I'm also looking for something else to happen, an accident or something. You're focused on the story you intend to tell and then you have to have a peripheral net out to catch these accidents.

You can really help support a character if you understand the setting. So for that reason I generally write about Philadelphia.

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

As a novelist, I'm endlessly fascinated by human behavior and interactions.

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

I think I would struggle with any job if it was purely about effects. Even as a viewer, those aren't the kind of things that interest me. I think ultimately you have to be connected to characters and their relationships. Otherwise, it's not drama to me.

I tend to come up with people more than situations - most of my books start with a character.

I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.

It's rare that I actually have a story in my head. I have events or 'what's the next move?' Like, Maggie, 'where's she going to go in this story, where's she going to end up?' Then the story has to fill in the in-between, and that comes as I'm starting it.

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.