Peter Gould Quotes

There are technical tricks that may help you create more effective characters. My approach to characterization is not at all technical. I can't really analyze how I do it, but I am sure of one thing. To write convincing characters, you must possess the ability to think yourself into someone else's skin.

You can start imagining all kinds of things characters would feel, but you have to have a sense of whether those imaginings might be right.

What I look for in any character, good or bad, is whether I can hear him speak. If I can imagine him that clearly, then I can write about him.

Once I started to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I just let them start talking.

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.

I always believed in my characters. I lived them.

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.

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 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.

As a writer, I always think about who my prototype actors are, in my brain. It's helpful, as a writer, to think about that.

You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you're a writer.

I spend a lot of time with my characters.

I think the idea is to try and understand everything about the characters and where the character is coming from, from their point of view, why they say what they do. And not, 'Oh, but I would never say that. Why does the character say that?' But then making it as personal as possible.

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.

I don't have to live the lives of my characters to write about them. It's about really putting yourself in their shoes.

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

But I always need to identify with a character to write about him or her - and by 'identify,' I mean see the world through that person's eyes and have a strong sense of the inner logic of their acts and decisions, wacky or wrongheaded though they might be. In that sense, I think there's some of me in all of them.

I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you're going to write them convincingly.

I do a lot better if I sit around and think about a character for a couple of months.

I really like getting inside the heads of female characters. I think I can do that well, and I enjoy it.

I love to evoke the bones and meat and thoughts of characters.

Most of the time, when I'm writing, I'm writing for myself. I'm thinking, 'What will my character say at this time? What will come out of her mouth?' I create individuals so real to me, I sometimes start talking to them. Then I let them loose on the page.

Part of being a fiction writer is being able to imagine how someone else is thinking and feeling. I think I've always been good at that.

To imagine yourself inside another person... is what a storywriter does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.