Emma Healey Quotes

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.

When I'm writing a story, which takes me a year or more, I can feel my character living with me - they're responding to whatever funny, familial, or social situation I'm in, and I think about their responses constantly.

I'm always determined that as a novelist I'm going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.

When I create characters, I create a world to inhabit and they begin to feel very real for me. I don't belong in a psych ward, I don't think, but they become very real, like my own family, and then I have to say goodbye, close the door, and work on other things.

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.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

Usually, when I write a novel, it takes me about 100 pages to figure out the voice of the narrator.

For a while, when I got out of college, I tried to write fiction. I'd grown up more around novelists, and my initial attraction was to write fiction. But I was much less suited for it. I always struggled to figure out what people were saying or doing in a particular moment.

I don't ever really know where I get my characters from.

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

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

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?

I love... What's gratifying to me is when you make/create a character and a human being, a person who lives entirely and who has their own existence, just merely from the words on a page.

I always believed in my characters. I lived them.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

I suppose it's possible that a writer would have feeling for his characters, but I can't see how, because writing is such a meticulous, intricate, technical business. I wish I could say that I love my characters and that frequently they take over the book and run away with the plot and so on. But they don't exist.

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

The great thing about writing is that you always put yourself in the shoes of the character. If you're doing it right, you can see into the heart of all your characters. Usually, when there's a writing problem, it's because you aren't doing that.

I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.

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

After a while, the characters I'm writing begin to feel real to me. That's when I know I'm heading in the right direction.

I'm at the mercy of whatever character comes into my head.

I never have particular actors planned when I'm in the process of writing.