Gail Simone Quotes

The best stories, the most-fun 'Avengers' stories, explore the relationships between the characters.

When you're writing a team book where every character already has his or her own series, you don't have dominion over them as individuals - but what you can exploit is their relationships with one another.

It's people politics, people dynamics that make a show really good, whether it's 'Desperate Housewives' or 'Lost' or 'The Sopranos.' It's the people we've grown to love or otherwise.

What television gets to do, and there's a reason why 'S.H.I.E.L.D.' works as well as it does, is that it deals with the relationships. It deals with the very small, interpersonal ways that people both love and hate each other.

I think supporting casts in comics are missing. I think a lot of the time in comics, all we have are people in costumes talking to other people in costumes, superheroes talking to superheroes and supervillains, and that's it.

What's great about 'The Avengers' is that it's the next step. It's not just superhero fights super-villain and superhero wins. It's about superheroes that come together and interact. It's a clash of the egos. You could do 'Avengers 1' without a villain, just with all these guys coming together. They could sit down and just have a discussion.

You treat characters like people you meet in life-friends or mentors.

Having to think so much about fictitious relationships that work or don't work, and with each relationship between characters managing to do one or other of those in its own peculiar way, I spend a lot of time thinking about relationships, real and imagined.

One of those things that I like about TV is that if you get a group of people you like, you can work with these people for months at a time, and you can discover their strengths and weaknesses, and you can use those in the direction where you take the characters.

'Homeland' really is one of those shows where they start to write more or less depending on what's kind of going on in a relationship between characters.

I like shows that are ensemble-based, that explore the humanity of every character.

Dialogue is something I don't get a lot of on 'Game of Thrones.'

For me, any story I tackle begins with the human relationships and not the plot.

I do just love the characters in sci-fi, but not necessarily the fact that it's sci-fi.

I think the more depth you build into the characters, and the more you see where they came from, the more fun you can have. Setting up different characters in different relationships is always helpful as you move forward.

Actually, I find it great fun to develop family series with lots of characters.

A certain luxury when you get to writing a novel is to have the space to have your characters just banter.

I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.

A lot of people have asked me about some of the characters that appear in 'Clockwork Prince,' like Aloysius Starkweather and Woolsey Scott. A lot of people like Woolsey Scott, which I was really happy about because he's very fun to write.

I think all television has to be about relationships and I don't think horror for the sake of it can work unless you're able to ground it in some kind of relationship.

Third person allows a deeper exploration of the relationships between characters. We can see their misunderstandings and hear what they think about each other. We can create a more complex structure with various story threads running parallel.

I never think of an entire book at once. I always just start with a very small idea. In 'Holes,' I just began with the setting; a juvenile correctional facility located in the Texas desert. Then I slowly make up the story, and rewrite it several times, and each time I rewrite it, I get new ideas, and change the old ideas around.

I've always loved shows that combine both approaches - that have a mythology and a set of characters, whose stories develop and change, and where the relationships evolve and fracture.

There's a whole element of human interaction and character interaction that I really enjoy doing.

I wanted to show those characters discovering it is possible to find common ground, as they make their way through a plotline that I hope is engrossing enough to keep the reader a willing participant.