Ben Dolnick Quotes

If you can make a character likable that's not very nice, that's the challenge of the job.

The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

You don't need to like your protagonists.

People always tell me I'm nothing like my character. Well, hopefully not! He's a character who's very defined. He was purposefully written by Jo Rowling as very one-dimensional in the first few books, because you're supposed to hate him.

I'm not much of a plotter. I start off with an inciting incident, and in classic crime fiction what happens is that all the action flows from that incident. It's very comfy when it all ties up and feels like a complete universe, but my stuff doesn't always work that way.

I hate plots.

A good story will keep you wondering about what's happening, what's going on, where does this go? Now it's going to go that way, now it's going to go that way. It has to do that. If it's predictable, it's just boring.

If the reader is rooting for the protagonist, they'll forgive you just about everything else.

Plots may be simple or complex, but suspense, and climactic progress from one incident to another, are essential. Every incident in a fictional work should have some bearing on the climax or denouement, and any denouement which is not the inevitable result of the preceding incidents is awkward and unliterary.

With TV season structures - and I'm a huge TV watcher - you look at shows like 'Breaking Bad,' which is my favorite show of all time, and 'The Sopranos,' which is pretty high up there as well, and there was that thing where, every season, Walter White would go up a level, but there would be a new bad.

It's amazing how far you can get into a plot before you figure out what you're doing.

Eventually, after the hero and heroine, it is the antagonist who comes with the most anticipation in any film.

With storytelling, you have to see yourself as the hero in the movie of your own life, and I kind of see myself as a supporting role, a walk-on role that has five lines. I say, 'Mr. President, the Russians are here.' That's how I see myself.

We need the villain sometimes. It makes for an interesting story.

It seems to me that most characters, in anything, are flawed in some way, just like most people. You look for the good in the flawed people and vice versa, and then try and make them appealing in some way.

The first act is the easiest to plot. The second act is always the hardest to plot. Generally a good, you know, sometimes the third act can be difficult because you can get into a rut in the third act - everybody runs to their Corvette, has a chase, and you catch the bad guy.

When I first began to have the initial idea for 'Heartsease,' I just wrote a skeleton story; that is, I started her off as this young, bright 16-year-old and then added the events that occurred and where she and other characters fitted in, even writing 3 different endings, as I was not sure where Mary's story would lead to.

Action-adventure, that genre, only works for me if you can care about the characters. If the hero's not taking some kind of a journey, then there are no stakes - and no stakes, then you don't care if he lives or dies, wins or loses.

No author ever drew a character consistent to human nature, but he was forced to ascribe to it many inconsistencies.

The villain of any story is often the most compelling character.

It's tough. It's very tricky to throw a morally flexible character onto the screen and have an audience empathize. It's always an exercise in restraint.

A character on screen that's the 'good guy' or the 'bad guy,' they're never interesting. There's got to be an internal struggle, the duality is important to find.

In the best stories, people are morally complex; they are flawed. We read them because the world is flawed, and we want to see it truthfully represented. And because it can be thrilling to be shocked and upset, and even to feel, for chilling moments, what it's like to be a bad person.

I don't necessarily prefer playing villains. I know a lot of people say they are more fun, but if the scriptwriter has done their work well, you can find something realistic in a villain and find the mistakes in a hero - it's all down to the writing.

Good guy' or 'bad guy', hero or anti hero; doesn't matter to me, what role I play, only the character have something magical.