Bob Shacochis Quotes

Sometimes you have to search for inspiration with characters, and other times, they just drop out of the sky and arrive.

But it's hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from - imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my past, and many of the short stories cleave very closely to my life, but the more stories I wrote in the collection, the more that seemed to be invented, but who knows... I think I'm writing about a young woman with acne who shoplifts, but I'm really writing about myself.

Many books that you read, they have those disclaimers that say that, "None of the events and none of the people are based on real life" and so on... Well, I don't believe that. I think that as human beings many people touch us, especially people we love the most and we can't help but do character sketches when we go to our art.

I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with.

That's the most amazing thing about writing, whether it's in prose or comics: that you can create something from nothing, and suddenly they come to life, like they've always been there.

In my experience, a novel is the culmination of various thoughts and impressions collected over time, until something comes along to give them a shape, to turn them into a story.

I'm just making 'Threadworlds' out of the things I love and that I'm passionate about learning. When we created 'Avatar,' Michael DiMartino and I did the same thing.

I just love that feeling of being in another world, of creating characters and watching where they go.

No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point; but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess.

I find it inspiring and I always think when I'm working on something new, whether it's a new kind of character or a new kind of story or new kind of camera, it gets my creative wheels spinning.

The movies I make tend not to be quite reality but the characters are inspired by real people and they're always very personal.

Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters.

Sometimes I create a character from a scrap - a mere mention that has been left behind.

GOOD AS NEW was born out of the idea of writing a play where the stakes were high and the collisions were of a verbal nature. Also I wanted to write a play where people were smarter than I was, and more alive than I feel normally. I became interested in the idea of characters who would surprise me. I guess one could argue that nothing comes out of you that wasn't within you to begin with, but maybe there are ways to trick yourself into becoming more an observer or an advocate for the characters.

It's a little bit like talking about the life of writing. The life of writing may be about many things, but it always begins with the writer. With the kernel of an idea, or a character, or an idea or a theme, or even an outcome. But for documentary photographers, photographs begin at that intersection of the real world and the imaginative inner world.

Writing, even though it's hard work, is really a joy when you get these characters to come alive. It's hard to trace where they come from. I can't say that I am sitting here one night at nine o'clock and that a character occurs to me. The magic for me happens at the typewriter.

It's funny - for a long time, I didn't know I was writing a book. I was writing stories. For me, each story took so long and took so much out of me, that when I finished it, I was like, Oh my gosh, I feel like I've poured everything from myself into this, and then I'd get depressed for a week. And then once I was ready to write a new story, I would want to write about something that was completely different, so I would search for a totally different character with a different set of circumstances.

Making up characters and places and plots, unlike fixing your plumbing or doing dishes, is anything but practical or rational. I write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right.

I find it really hard to throw myself into something artistically where I'm making up a whole character and finding something for that character to do.

You can't wait for someone to give you a show. That can't be the first time you're writing and drawing a character.

As a writer, I absorb stories, allow them to churn within my own head and heart - often for years - until I find a way of telling them that fits both my time and temperament.

The characters in my stories, whether historical or fictional, usually prove to be a compilation of influences taken from differing sources, but never drawn from one model.

It didn't occur to me that it was possible to breathe life into Abraham Lincoln.

What's funny about that is when I was writing Twilight just for myself and not thinking of it as a book, I was not thinking about publishing, and yet at the same time I was casting it in my head. Because when I read books, I see them very visually.