Jill Paton Walsh Quotes

When you write for a show that's not yours, your job is to hear the voices of the characters and write as best you can for those voices.

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

I care more about making sure the story is correct and the characters are behaving in character than I do about the individual jokes.

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

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.

People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.

I do extensive research before I begin writing, but only a fraction of the research goes into the novels. The writer does not need to tell the reader everything. But one hopes that the writer's belief in his characters is evident in the telling, just as the mood created in the writer's mind comes through in the atmosphere of the scene described.

What's the difference between Hollywood characters and my characters? Mine are real.

I've done a number of things based on real people or true stories or based on books, and I'm a great believer that you have to be true to the script.

I think the main thing to remember when writing a novel is to stay true to the characters.

Especially when I write, I want to get out of people's heads and have them speak and have them get dressed and have them go to work.

When you create a show, and create characters, these people are like children to you.

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

I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I'm living that story, and I don't give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns.

I very seldom, very seldom, even know what my characters look like.

Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it's a character that's very different from you.

I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

It's your job to come up with compelling characters who speak to an individual authenticity. If I'm not interested in the characters, I can't go on. I have to be fascinated by them.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

I really enjoy working in genre series, because you really have to create the characters.

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

The very best way I can make any reader believe in the nuts and bolts of an art form... is to know the mechanics, to make the characters grounded in convincing detail.

Usually when I write a script, I have in mind some real people that I'm writing about, who don't always act in the film afterward.

I think it's always challenging to look at a script and make it your own while maintaining the sense of what the style of the show is.