Aaron Ehasz Quotes

From a writer's standpoint, each character and story presents its own unique challenges and delights. I'm deeply curious about all of my characters, and I love peeling away their layers to see what's underneath their skin, or secreted deep within their hearts.

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.

The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.

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.

And I have the support of the writers: I have a great relationship with the creative team, and they have a good hold of my character and my personality, and they come up with some great stuff, and I'm forever trying to change it up, keep it fresh.

Never argue with your characters; they know themselves better than you do.

I spend a lot of time with my characters.

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

Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, I've never had the sense I was 'making up' a character. It feels more like watching people reveal themselves, ever more deeply, more intimately.

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.

My characters surprise me constantly. My characters are like my friends - I can give them advice, but they don't have to take it. If your characters are real, then they surprise you, just like real people.

What fascinates me as a writer is the stuff underneath, To me, what drives a novel is the curiosity behind the character and the depths that you want to find in that character.

The question of likability is a bit of a puzzler for me. You know, I don't write people with likability in mind. It's more whether or not I find them compelling.

When you begin a play, you're going to have to spend a lot of time with those characters, so those characters are going to have to be rich enough that you want to take a very long journey with them. That's how I begin thinking about what I want to write about and who I want to write about.

When I'm breaking in a character like Jessica Jones, I have this amazing opportunity to create her backstory. It's all of the work that happens before I'm ever on camera... Writing 'Bonfire' was like doing all of that fun stuff; it was like 300 pages of prep work.

It's always nice to do the flashbacks. That's what's so great about 'Scandal' is that we get to do flashbacks and then keep figuring out and discovering more things about our characters that make them fuller.

Stories are important, but I'm really into characters, and if you can give birth to a good one, that's true success.

I think my best quality as a writer is the ability to craft complicated, nuanced, interesting characters.

I separate myself from my characters as much as possible, but I have these books that I create which are interactive diaries/timelines/memory books/pictures of the character's entire world.

I like to stay within the zone of one character. It would disturb me to break away and go into an entirely different territory.

I always try to make my characters people, and yet I always want to entertain.

As an author you hope your characters have sparks but truly in the end they have minds of their own!

I think books with weak or translucent plots can survive if the character being drawn along the path is rich, interesting and multi-faceted. The opposite is not true.

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.

How I work is I work from of very character-driven place. And I trust the writers.