Shailene Woodley Quotes

My books usually end where they began. I try to bring characters back to a point that is familiar but different because of the growth that they have gone through.

Filmmaking is always sort of building a mosaic of this arc of what the character is going through.

One pleasure of working on a trilogy is watching characters warp and grow over time.

I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.

Plot makes the character just as history makes the man.

With a series, you build the character as you go. When you've got a shorter project or a film, you know the overall arc from the beginning.

You have 22 episodes to start from zero to hero; you can really take a nice, big, long arc. In a film, it's tough to do that - you only have 90 minutes.

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

Every film you're commissioned to write is all about an arc; usually, the arc is that the world creates a change in the character, usually for the better. To not have an arc, the messages and ideas in the film became more prominent.

I think what good television does well is that it shows characters evolving.

My character on 'The Good Wife' is a smaller character, and his story arcs are typically season-long, unless it's a big episode for him. His transitions take place over many, many hours.

I've often said the reader knows every bit as much about Thorne as I do. When I created him for 'Sleepyhead,' I was determined he should be a character who would develop, book by book, change and grow as we all do, and who - crucially - would be unpredictable.

I tend to relate to a character in terms of the arc: what's interesting is where he starts versus where he ends up.

After a while, the character sort of took over.

In the writers' room, when we talk about each episode, we first talk about the character journey of the episode.

I love to see how a character unfolds off the page in a project. I don't always know how the character is going to turn out, even with the script being there. It's not always clear where that character is going to take me. Or where I will take them.

Being able to stay with a character over the course of years is a gift.

When you can have a character that the audience likes from the beginning, but then you put them in a situation where they grow - I think that gives it a lot of heart.

For me to have the opportunity to stay with one character for, God willing, a long period of time, is really exciting.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

I look for roles where there is some kind of an arc to the story.

What's fun about doing a series is you get to take some time to create the character.

With any project, but especially in television, I always try to look at where the character is starting from and where he's going to end up, and try to find the biggest arc that makes it the most exciting to play.

Whenever you're blessed and given a second season, you can really let the characters evolve. That first season, you're setting everything up. It's background, where they're coming from, what they want to do. And then you get to marinate in it that second season.