Taylor Sheridan Quotes

My stories are character driven.

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

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

I, as a fan of numerous TV shows and movies, know that people mess up. The characters that we love are not always going to act in the ways that we want them to. That's what makes them interesting.

The story is always in service to the characters, and is only as long or short, or neat or ragged as it needs to be.

I'm about my characters.

As a writer, you understand how hard it is to build up backstory for characters, so you can have impactful moments. You have to build toward something and then pay it off.

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

You've got to leave the reader with more than just a name and a costume - they need to know who the character is, what they're like, what kind of attitude they have, what sort of role they play.

Every single film I've done, it's about the character.

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.

Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don't need to be told what to do.

You just play what a writer writes, in terms of what a character chooses to do and how a character chooses to deal with their various relationships.

I try to begin with a strong grasp of my characters. Even if it's schematic, I need it clear in my head who these people are.

I have a cheat-sheet for each one of my characters about their personality, the way they look, etc. So there is no possible way that I could have writer's block.

Coming from TV and film, rule number one is that you always service the main character first and foremost. If that's not working, you've got nothing.

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.

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

I always say that characters must drive plots, never the reverse. Writing about large-scale events creates the risk that the scope of the events themselves can overwhelm the characters. I emphatically do not want that. That was the only trepidation I felt when I started 'The Twilight War.'

Most of my films have been very character driven.

I look for absurdly simple plots so that I can simply focus on the characters. Having an understanding of what dialogue's easy to say and hard to say - I think that that's helpful, too.

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

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.

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'.