Nahnatchka Khan Quotes

When you write for a show that's not yours, your job is to hear the voices of the characters and write as best you can for those voices.

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

When you write, you hear the characters speaking to you as you take dictation from what they say. And obviously, they had particular personalities when you hear them.

At the end of the day, it's really, really difficult to make a brand-new show, to write a pilot where you have to introduce characters and everyone has to kind of be dynamic and have something different for themselves.

So much of what I do... is coming up with new characters and trying to invent voices for them, and to have people fully fleshed out in my head and to know who can say what in the scene and who these characters are... I love it.

Usually when I write a script, I have in mind some real people that I'm writing about, who don't always act in the film afterward.

When people ask me about my dialogue, I say, 'Don't you hear people talking?' That's all I do. I hear a certain type of individual, I decide this is what he should be, whatever it is, and then I hear him. Well, I don't hear anybody that I can't make talk.

You can write and write, but if you don't have someone who can nail that character, it's never going to live.

You can't really write until the characters kind of show up one day and tell you what they're going to say. You start to hear the rhythm of the way the people talk, and then it becomes easier.

Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.

It's easier to cast yourself in something you've written because you know your voice.

TV writing - for me, at least - is half original voice and half an embodiment and a representation of the spirit of the actors you're writing for.

I would say, A, you can't really teach anyone how to write good characters, because it's something you have to teach yourself or already have innately in you as a storyteller, and, B, coming up with a good screenplay is a very, very small fraction of what it takes to be a good screenwriter.

Many of my characters first came through to me as voices. That's why I use a tape recorder.

I actually wanted to be a writer long before I wanted to be an actor.

But I always need to identify with a character to write about him or her - and by 'identify,' I mean see the world through that person's eyes and have a strong sense of the inner logic of their acts and decisions, wacky or wrongheaded though they might be. In that sense, I think there's some of me in all of them.

Writing a new play shouldn't be seen as a mystery belonging to a priesthood, but as a challenge, a technical challenge, just to get into it.

I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you're going to write them convincingly.

The cool thing about Kyle Killen, he writes really defined characters. I was a big fan of 'Awake' and also 'Lone Star.' I just think that he's a really, really special writer, and complex and deep, and a really smart dude.

One of the reasons I started working at 'South Park,' actually, was that I wanted to learn how to structure things and how to tell a story.

I write a ridiculous number of drafts. The characters change and grow through the drafting, and my understanding of them deepens. Creating characters in a novel is like shooting at clay pigeons and missing, and then missing more productively as the narrative continues.

I tend to write one character at a time. But I don't write the entirety of one character at a time.

A lot of times characters are combinations of people I come across in life. I people-watch a lot.

I dreamed of being an actress when I was a little kid because you don't know then that the writer writes everything the actor is saying. But as I got older, I got into college and became more aware that writing is another option, and I started getting into it, too.

Because they feel that without them telling you to do this, you wouldn't have had the characters that you have, you wouldn't have the book that you have.