Brandon Sanderson Quotes

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.

I always say that characters must drive plots, never the reverse. Writing about large-scale events creates the risk that the scope of the events themselves can overwhelm the characters. I emphatically do not want that. That was the only trepidation I felt when I started 'The Twilight War.'

The characters are telling you the story. I'm not telling you the story, they're going to do it. If I do it right, you will get the whole story.

Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.

If you have no conflict, you have no story. That's number one. That's a rule of novels.

I think each book sort of finds its own theme as it goes on. 'Warded Man' was fear. 'Desert Spear' was exploration of the other. 'Daylight War' was relationships. Some of this is intentional, and some of it evolves naturally. The series as a whole is obviously something I have given a lot of thought to, but each book is its own animal as well.

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.

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

People are much more complicated in real life, but my characters are as subtle and nuanced as I can make them. But if you say my characters are too black and white, you've missed the point. Villains are meant to be black-hearted in popular novels. If you say I have a grey-hearted villain, then I've failed.

I usually start with an ending, then outline high points of things that happen, and kind of make up the rest as I go along. Occasionally, the characters surprise me, and I wonder how we got here. Other times, the characters are stubborn and won't do something I want them to in the story.

For me, screenwriting is all about setting characters in motion and as a writer just chasing them. They should tell you what they'll do in any scene you put them in.

In a way, the characters often do take over.

Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don't need to be told what to do.

The story is always in service to the characters, and is only as long or short, or neat or ragged as it needs to be.

It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can 'take over' as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.

We have that illusion that we are 'deciding' what to make a character do, in order to 'convey our message' or something like that. But, at least in my experience, you are often more like a river-rafting guide who's been paid a bonus to purposely steer your clients into the roughest possible water.

Storylines are how characters create the plots involved in their stories.

Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there's always some drive in it that is entirely personal - even if you don't know it while you're doing it.

When I write fiction, I have the illusion of being able to control these fictional worlds and these characters, and to make them say what I want them to say. Of course, the problem is that it is an illusion, and by the end of it you realize that you're not in control of it at all; the characters have taken over, and they're driving the vehicle.

I don't start with a list of historical scenes that I want to include in the book. At a certain point, the narrative totally takes over, and everything that I include I can only incorporate if it answers to the internal terms of the novel.

When it comes to a character, I make sure that it adds to the plot.

As a writer, you understand how hard it is to build up backstory for characters, so you can have impactful moments. You have to build toward something and then pay it off.

My characters aren't chess pieces. I don't move them around some big board. I actually care about these fictitious people.

Sometimes as writers, we try and put narrative development above character development. We try to move our characters around like chess pieces that do our bidding. The problem with that is sometimes the characters do things they shouldn't do. Things that are inorganic.

When you get to play a character that's in love, it's cool. Once you have love as a motivator in a story, your character is free to do anything.