Victoria Hanley Quotes

I locate that special problem in a character and then try to understand it. That's the genesis of all my work.

In the old days, I just could not leave characters alone. Now I just try to keep the ones that still have something in the way of stories to tell.

I really fall in love with my characters, even the bad ones. I love getting together with them. They tell me what to do; they take me on a wild and wonderful trip.

You can't take a character anywhere they don't expect the character to go. But within those confines is where creativity lies.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.

After a while, the character sort of took over.

When I develop a character, I usually start by creating a backstory with whatever information I have access to.

I like to take a character and develop it.

Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there.

My characters surprise me constantly. My characters are like my friends - I can give them advice, but they don't have to take it. If your characters are real, then they surprise you, just like real people.

Often the starting point for characters, for me, is finding a little, most minor detail, and I'll go from there.

When I'm breaking in a character like Jessica Jones, I have this amazing opportunity to create her backstory. It's all of the work that happens before I'm ever on camera... Writing 'Bonfire' was like doing all of that fun stuff; it was like 300 pages of prep work.

A character takes shape in the act of writing. You start with something, and you add or subtract.

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

I take little bits and pieces of ideas that I may or may not believe in but I give them to this character and he runs with them. I have fun with however he handles the situation.

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 nice to create a character, not just within two scenes, but within the journey of a whole movie. It's fun to do that.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

How I work is I work from of very character-driven place. And I trust the writers.

And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.

My sister was the inspiration for the character, the good qualities instilled in the character. The initial inspiration was there, but Stargirl has taken on a life of her own. She's her own character now.

If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character's mind at that point, it may not turn out to be a very good play, but at least it will be a play where people are behaving in a kind of truthful way.

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.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.