Stephen Vizinczey Quotes

Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.

I always try to write about believable people.

Characters are not created on paper or laptop alone.

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 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.

My first job is to write the characters as full and authentic people as well as I can.

I like to make definite choices and give my characters as many unique edges as possible.

It's hard to know whether certain characters come to life or not, they either come to have their own life or they don't. I've written many things in which the characters just remain inert.

There's a bizarre insistence on how a story should be. 'The protagonist must be sympathetic!' they say. Whatever that means. I never engage in that discussion. I never use that word, 'sympathetic.' I just know 'interesting.'

All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.

I love making characters real and believable, through my own experience and choices.

One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.

To me, my characters are more real than most people I meet.

To give a character life in a short space of time, it helps if you arrive on screen with a past.

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

My job is to allow the character to live and breathe - and become as real to the reader as he or she is to me.

I suppose it's easier for most writers to create and vivify characters of their own gender.

I always talk about my characters like they're real people.

Normally you read a screenplay - and I read a lot of them - and the characters don't feel like people. They feel like plot devices or cliches or stereotypes.

You need the audience to become invested in the characters and in order to become invested, they need to identify with the characters... and that's why the characters need to be real.

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

My characters live inside my head for a long time before I actually start a book about them. Then, they become so real to me I talk about them at the dinner table as if they are real. Some people consider this weird. But my family understands.

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

For me that's the magic of the printed page - we don't have to pay attention to the passage of time and focus in on the realities of these characters at a specific age or at a specific time in their lives, and we can play with that to our hearts' content.

I don't tend to picture my characters as actors and actresses.