Thomas Steinbeck Quotes

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character.

I usually start with a repulsive character and go on from there.

My books usually end where they began. I try to bring characters back to a point that is familiar but different because of the growth that they have gone through.

I'm drawn particularly to stories that evolve out of the character of the protagonist.

I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.

In the writers' room, when we talk about each episode, we first talk about the character journey of the episode.

Filmmaking is always sort of building a mosaic of this arc of what the character is going through.

For me to have the opportunity to stay with one character for, God willing, a long period of time, is really exciting.

With a series, you build the character as you go. When you've got a shorter project or a film, you know the overall arc from the beginning.

You have 22 episodes to start from zero to hero; you can really take a nice, big, long arc. In a film, it's tough to do that - you only have 90 minutes.

When I read a script or I see a character, I don't necessarily see the arc of her, that by the end she is this person, she's different from she was in the beginning. I guess it's more a subconscious understanding of that arc.

I look for roles where there is some kind of an arc to the story.

If you have great characters, then your reader becomes emotionally invested in those people.

Whenever you're blessed and given a second season, you can really let the characters evolve. That first season, you're setting everything up. It's background, where they're coming from, what they want to do. And then you get to marinate in it that second season.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

Every film you're commissioned to write is all about an arc; usually, the arc is that the world creates a change in the character, usually for the better. To not have an arc, the messages and ideas in the film became more prominent.

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

My character on 'The Good Wife' is a smaller character, and his story arcs are typically season-long, unless it's a big episode for him. His transitions take place over many, many hours.

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'.

I've often said the reader knows every bit as much about Thorne as I do. When I created him for 'Sleepyhead,' I was determined he should be a character who would develop, book by book, change and grow as we all do, and who - crucially - would be unpredictable.

One pleasure of working on a trilogy is watching characters warp and grow over time.

I like for there to be a moral, for the character to have gotten something out of the experience.

I think everybody goes through changes, and the same should be said for fictional characters, especially ones that you follow on television.

Being able to stay with a character over the course of years is a gift.

There's something pretty awesome about staying with a character and growing.