Noelle Stevenson Quotes

You know it's my job to visualize, what is literal or audible, so I designed all the characters, and I designed what they do and how they should do it and so on.

When you're drawing something, you kind of run a movie in your head. You might close your eyes or stare into the distance and kind of see a movie unfolding and, you know, grab a certain moment or think, 'Oh, yeah, that's when we need just the point that he appears around the corner but just as she's getting into the car,' you know?

Usually when you're doing concepts for a character, you just try a couple different things to see what sticks.

I don't tend to cast roles in my head because I spend so much time with these characters and the drawings that they're complete in themselves, you know what I mean?

When you have a character to work with, you carry them around in a strange way - they make you look at the world in a different way.

I do take this insane pleasure in world-building. I get the world in my head, but I have to make sure everyone else gets it.

I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around.

When I'm creating characters, I definitely think of theme songs. Writing for me is very visual, so I sometimes think of it in terms of a movie with a soundtrack, and try to transfer that to words.

Actors, their greatest tool, their greatest resource is imagination. You can take things, power objects, you can recruit your dreams, you can access your memories and get there. So the idea is not to act but to just be.

I just love to be able to actually build a character.

I don't base any character on a real person, and really don't do composites either. I make them up.

I always start drawing any job by planning out to some degree the locales and trying to nail the characters. If they're existing characters, I'll draw them several times on rough paper just to get a feeling for them. The ideal when you're drawing a comic is to have everything in your head, not to have to refer to notes.

As a writer, I always think about who my prototype actors are, in my brain. It's helpful, as a writer, to think about that.

Interestingly that some of the characters did not turn out the way Jim and Allen had envisioned them.

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

Every so often when I'm writing, a character might actually be a distinct person in my head - often not an actor or a face, literally a person who just seems to exist in my imagination. Then the challenge is finding somebody who is close enough to that to make me feel like I've ended up where I wanted to be.

Creating characters is just another way to express a type and put that type to use.

I like being a storyteller. I'm bored with myself; I like to write about others. I have a lot of names in my songs: Karen, Margaret, Mary Kay. Even if it's about me, I want to put it through someone else. The music is the soundtrack to the story.

I work out the other bits, too, but I need to know what I look like, very early on. And then it's like a template; I'll fill that person out. If I get that out of the way, then I'm all right.

What I'm really trying to do is create unique characters.

Inspiration is key for me in choosing characters.

I start with an idea in my head. I sketch it out quickly as a line drawing, using pencil. It never comes out quite right - usually a bit better than my mental picture.

I love creating new characters that are whatever they are.

As a storyteller, when you see somebody who is the character you envisioned, you feel this energy in the room.

It's an imaginative thing we do; it's about immersing oneself in one's imagination. If you're a novelist, you do it with pen and paper. We do it with our bodies.