Susan Campbell Bartoletti Quotes

Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there.

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

Often the starting point for characters, for me, is finding a little, most minor detail, and I'll go from there.

When you create a character, you create it for yourself - you do whatever you want. It's your job to explore it in as many different avenues as you can in order to make it a fully wounded character.

I mean, can I really create a full, three-dimensional character? I don't know anymore. I'm certainly going to try.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

What makes characters real are details, and if you're crafting a person from scratch, you're probably not going to pay as much attention to a question like, 'Does this person bite their nails?'

Creating characters is like throwing together ingredients for a recipe. I take characteristics I like and dislike in real people I know, or know of, and use them to embellish and define characters.

I tend to come up with people more than situations - most of my books start with a character.

I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters - to make them personalities.

I like to take a character and develop it.

You always have to create the character from the ground up.

You have to start from a place of trying to create a character.

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

Whenever you have a role where you don't get to know anything about the character, you have to invent it yourself. You have to feel like it came from somewhere.

Characters are not created on paper or laptop alone.

It's always incredible though when you feel like the writer knows the character intimately and can see their life sprawling away outside of the show.

I don't ever really know where I get my characters from.

The thing with videogame characters is that they tend to be really undercooked, and people don't take the time to really flesh them out. They don't treat them with the respect that a writer writing characters in any other medium would treat their character.

It's nice to create a character, not just within two scenes, but within the journey of a whole movie. It's fun to do that.

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.

I think it's important that a director be able to know his characters inside and out.

My first job is to write the characters as full and authentic people as well as I can.

When you're writing a book, with people in it as opposed to animals, it is no good having people who are ordinary, because they are not going to interest your readers at all. Every writer in the world has to use the characters that have something interesting about them, and this is even more true in children's books.

For every book that I write... I develop a history for each person and make sure they are well rounded and flawed. You have to know everything about them from their shoe size, to where they went to school, to what their first pet was, to what they like to eat, to what they want out of life.