Mason Cooley Quotes

I want to give my characters nuance.

My first job is to write the characters as full and authentic people as well as I can.

So much of what I do... is coming up with new characters and trying to invent voices for them, and to have people fully fleshed out in my head and to know who can say what in the scene and who these characters are... I love it.

What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.

When you're creating a character out of nothing, you have to make all the guesses as to how they walk, how they talk, how they think. It was all there on the table for us to pick and choose for Murrow.

What I look for in any character, good or bad, is whether I can hear him speak. If I can imagine him that clearly, then I can write about him.

I try to distinguish my characters from each other.

I try to talk about things I know about. But my characters are more of a combination of people or how I imagine people would feel.

There are so many characters whizzing around inside my head, it's like Looney Tunes. But as soon as I've finished writing about them, I completely forget who they are.

What I'm really trying to do is create unique characters.

I take stuff from real life and try to make a character out of it. And I try to live the world of the characters a little bit.

When I write a book, characters come to life for me somewhere at the back of my head. I strive to make them flesh and blood in an abstract way, in words.

Characters are not created on paper or laptop alone.

I write in character a lot.

It's always fun to layer a character, to make the character a little bit more dynamic than it is on paper.

I used to say I wasn't interested in writing about characters.

I don't ever really know where I get my characters from.

I plot the first 5 or 6 chapters quite minutely, and also the end. So I know where I am going but not how I'm going to get there, which gives characters the chance to develop organically, as happens in real life as you get to know a person.

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

I mean, can I really create a full, three-dimensional character? I don't know anymore. I'm certainly going to try.

The interesting thing about fiction from a writer's standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you.

When I'm creating characters, I definitely think of theme songs. Writing for me is very visual, so I sometimes think of it in terms of a movie with a soundtrack, and try to transfer that to words.

I always do make a back story for myself, but I'm not sure how necessary it is. I just like to.

What makes characters real are details, and if you're crafting a person from scratch, you're probably not going to pay as much attention to a question like, 'Does this person bite their nails?'

I am not an analytical writer. Once I flesh out my characters and decide on the elements of my plot, the story unfolds in my head almost as though it was a movie reel.