Len Wein Quotes

Sympathetic characters usually have a voice. They usually don't have any trouble being heard.

I seem to have to make my characters family before I can access their hearts in any way that matters.

When I'm creating characters, I just want to create characters that I can relate to, and be as honest about them as people as I can be. That's what I want to see when I go to the movies.

I am a firm believer that a good plot makes for a fun enough read, but it's not what binds us. If we don't care about the characters, we won't care - not in a lasting way - about what's happening to them.

I've always felt, even with sketches, that if you don't care about these people, then it doesn't matter.

I'm focused on finding characters I connect to.

If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.

I always try to make my characters people, and yet I always want to entertain.

As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.

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.

If I don't fall in love with my characters, I cannot shoot.

I can tell you that as a writer and as a reader, I regard character as king. Or queen. No matter how riveting the action or interesting the plot twists, if I don't feel like I'm meeting someone who feels real, I'm not going to be compelled to read further.

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

When you're building a character, or at least when I'm building a character, you start saying, 'How am I going to make people like him?'

I wanted to give readers the feeling of knowing the characters, a mental image.

The question of likability is a bit of a puzzler for me. You know, I don't write people with likability in mind. It's more whether or not I find them compelling.

My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me, if that makes any sense.

My job is to see the world through the character's eyes.

Whether it is television or film, the character on the page has to speak to me.

It's very hard to connect with a character when you haven't gotten a sense of who they are.

Audiences need to engage with characters.

The characters don't all have to be likable, and they don't all have to be hateable. As long as it's interesting and you connect to them and they resonate with you and you want to find out what happens and it feels authentic, then we have something.

This is the beauty of fiction. We may not like these characters, but we inhabit them.

It can be a fictional character and yet relatable... It always depends on the content of the film and what you are doing.

It's always incredible though when you feel like the writer knows the character intimately and can see their life sprawling away outside of the show.