IronE Singleton Quotes

I try to research or make up for myself what happened in any character's life. From when he was born until the first page of the script. I fill in the blanks.

I'm really quite bad at coming up with plot ideas. I like to create characters and just see what will happen to them when I let them loose!

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.

Whenever you have a role where you don't get to know anything about the character, you have to invent it yourself. You have to feel like it came from somewhere.

The historical background is one of the easier aspects of writing a novel. Far more difficult is dreaming up the smaller, character-based scenes, scenes that rise entirely from one's own imagination.

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.

I am not an analytical writer. Once I flesh out my characters and decide on the elements of my plot, the story unfolds in my head almost as though it was a movie reel.

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.

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.

Because characters are your creations, you are the one who ultimately gets to decide their fate.

The fun thing about doing origin stories is you are introducing the audience to characters.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

I never have particular actors planned when I'm in the process of writing.

I never try to give a message in my books. It's about living with characters long enough to hear their voices and let them tell me the story. Sometimes I would love to have a happy ending, and it doesn't happen because the character or the story leads me in another direction.

I don't plot my novels - I move along with my characters.

Although when I start a novel I know how it will begin and end, I like to let the people within the story take me on a journey between those points without having a fixed plan.

In my head, at least, the business of spinning stories has no closing time. Twists in my characters' lives, glimpses of their secrets, obstacles to their dreams... all arrive unbidden when I'm getting cash at the ATM, walking my son to camp, singing a hymn at a wedding.

As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.

To try to create a character without a whole lot of information can be taxing. At the same time, it's fun to just stay on your toes and let the next bit of dialogue come in, and turn the page as you read the next script and see what they have in store for you next.

I like to take a character and develop it.

You always have to create the character from the ground up.

I'm about my characters.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

There are so many characters whizzing around inside my head, it's like Looney Tunes. But as soon as I've finished writing about them, I completely forget who they are.