Stephanie Laurens Quotes

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

To me, characters are at the heart of great literature.

You spend so much time writing a character the way I did with Buddy Baker and then Green Arrow that you start to care about them. And you almost think of them as people, you know?

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'm first and foremost interested in the story, the characters.

My stories are character driven.

I always talk about my characters like they're real people.

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'

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

I tend to spend a lot of time building characters that the reader will believe in and sympathize with.

When you write, you hear the characters speaking to you as you take dictation from what they say. And obviously, they had particular personalities when you hear them.

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.

My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.

If I've got one thing that I really believe about fiction and life, it's that there are no minor characters.

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.

I treat all my characters as if they were real, and I am scrupulous about the details of their lives.

There's a bizarre insistence on how a story should be. 'The protagonist must be sympathetic!' they say. Whatever that means. I never engage in that discussion. I never use that word, 'sympathetic.' I just know 'interesting.'

Creating characters is like throwing together ingredients for a recipe. I take characteristics I like and dislike in real people I know, or know of, and use them to embellish and define characters.

Never argue with your characters; they know themselves better than you do.

I don't really set out to explore grand themes. I set out to tell a story. And one I have to be able to imagine right through.

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.

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.

One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.

The characters in my stories all have quite loud lives in my head. It's a relief to get them on the page. Often they come from people I've noticed or overheard - but that is only a part of them. It's only by writing that I discover who these people really are.

One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don't permit you to do that.