Jeff Nichols Quotes

An author's characters do what he wants them to do.

If I'm practicing making up what the characters will do, it's never good. In fact, when I catch myself doing that, I try to get rid of that section, and try and let them start making the decisions.

It is a wonderful thing in the process of writing when such paper characters are first sketched, and, when one is doing good work, from a certain point in time they come alive and start contradicting the author as well.

I don't like having characters as props. I never want a character to be a prop.

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.

That was all Rose, and Rose knew what she was doing. Her main thing was story.

To make a book convincing, it's less important that the right tree be in the right place than that the characters are emotionally real.

We work with every one of them to see if their character wouldn't say a certain thing or if something is worded awkwardly - we work with them to rectify that.

Make your characters believable, and your reader will believe what they believe.

A script writer usually manipulates his characters in accordance to the script.

Every character, if fleshed out properly, is being taken seriously.

I would never, for the sake of the story or a twist, have a character do something that they just wouldn't do. I really couldn't. I'd rather miss out on the twist.

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.

Unlike life, you've got more or less complete control over what's going on in your stories. That's not to say you can make characters do whatever you want them to - they usually have a life of their own if you've done your job properly.

Writers often say that characters begin to write themselves, and I never used to believe that. I always thought that was complete hogwash.

As an author you hope your characters have sparks but truly in the end they have minds of their own!

I want to tell authentic, real stories with real characters.

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?'

Because characters are your creations, you are the one who ultimately gets to decide their fate.

Writing a TV show is totally different than writing features, or just, what I started doing is writing features. You write a little bit more organically. You start from the beginning to the end, beginning, middle and end.

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

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

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.

It's very, very important to me, no matter who the person is, to play that person with the utmost degree of truth that I'm able to bring. But playing a character like Jack Sparrow or Willy Wonka, that requires nothing but a degree of responsibility to the intent of the story - responsibility to the film-maker to deliver the goods.