Melinda Clarke Quotes

I enjoy bringing humanity to complex characters.

I think, when I write, one of the things that I'm really attempting to do is I'm attempting to humanize my characters.

If your character is just out there acting a fool, viewers are gonna say, 'Why am I watching this?' But if he's whispering, 'I don't really want to die,' there's a level of vulnerability cemented in these bad characters.

What I need, as a reader, is a character with a heart and a voice and a pulse. I need a character so vivid and so specific that she doesn't feel like fiction.

As a writer, I have to show complexities. Through my writings, I hope to bring out people in different situations and not just one-dimensional beings.

If there is any secret to my success, I think it's that my characters are very real to me. I feel everything they feel, and therefore I think my readers care about them.

I'm just looking for touching characters.

I love it when you like a character, and then she does something you don't like, and you hate her for a while - then you love her again. I'd like to see her have unlikable moments that the audience understands and sympathizes with.

Every reader knows about the feeling that characters in books seem more real than real people.

I love thinking of cartoon characters feeling really real feelings. And I love to do that, not just as a fan, but as a creator, so if people want to look for those levels, they're actually there.

If I'm reading a script, and I'm not buying it, I need to be able to relate to the character on some level, and they need to have more than one dimension. I need to have an idea of what this guy's thinking about when he's taking a shower not on camera. And if I can't picture him taking a shower and getting dressed, then he's not a real person.

Readers embrace all kinds of characters as long as they are written with emotional truth.

At the core, I try to write characters who are real people with real insecurities, fears, hopes, and dreams, which is why hopefully readers can identify with them.

I think, as journalists, we sometimes are afraid to enter into the emotional lives and the complications of the lives of the people we write about - we don't really have the space and the room to deal with those things. But as a novelist, that's precisely what you're writing about.

To make a book convincing, it's less important that the right tree be in the right place than that the characters are emotionally real.

I do feel more towards certain characters who have depth and intelligence.

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

Big Bird went through his very human kind of struggles as a child. No other children's character has been that complete and detailed.

There's something that's very human about 'Warriorv that brings you out. You're watching the movie and, yeah, there's fighting - there's a tournament at the end of the movie - but it takes a long time to get to know these people.

Your structure and format may not be perfect, and you may not have picked the perfect franchise, but if I pick up a script, and the characters are real, whole, complicated and come from a place of somebody who really is feeling it, that's what people remember.

The real trick to these movies and making the big action sequences work - and I've forgotten this sometimes and screwed it up - the characters really have to be humanized. Because you can have the greatest special effects in the world, but if you don't care about the people in those effects, there's no impact.

I think, ultimately, if you create characters that people like and can relate to, your characters are grounded on a human level even if your cars are not.

When a character has so many secrets and so much inner life, it's a joy to play those characters because you can use your craft.

If a reader comes across a story that makes them cry, you can be sure that the writer felt every single thing that makes the reader cry.

I don't think the challenge is asking an audience to like a character; it's inviting them to try and understand them... then making that journey entertaining and worth their while. It's a classic trick, but it's human, and it allows characters to have more depth.