Linus Roache Quotes

I just want to tell a good story, so I always ask myself, 'Are these people real to me?'

My preference is for good writing. It doesn't matter if it's for film or TV. Whatever. It starts with the writing. Even though I've had problems with writers, it doesn't matter how great of an actor you are. If the writing is bad, you're going to struggle.

If the characters are not alive to me, it doesn't matter how good the sentences are. It just becomes all cake and no frosting.

When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.

It was really fun to start writing movies because you could actually take characters whose voice you enjoy writing in and have actual things happen to them for more than five minutes. It was really fun to thread it together.

I never outline my novels before I write. I do have a vague sense of beginning, middle, and end at the outset of each book, but for me, writing has always been a very character-driven process.

I plot the first 5 or 6 chapters quite minutely, and also the end. So I know where I am going but not how I'm going to get there, which gives characters the chance to develop organically, as happens in real life as you get to know a person.

How I work is I work from of very character-driven place. And I trust the writers.

And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.

I always believed in my characters. I lived them.

Only in very rare circumstances will you see something cut out of my first drafts. Maybe it's because of the way I write. I'm very focused on the logical progression of the story, and every character has a role to play.

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character's mind at that point, it may not turn out to be a very good play, but at least it will be a play where people are behaving in a kind of truthful way.

When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.

In order to deliver the emotional truth in the story, you have to include some of the literal truth.

I suppose with any good writing and interesting characters, you can have that awfully overused word: a journey.

If you get a script and it's really well written, that's always exciting.

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

It is a wonderful thing in the process of writing when such paper characters are first sketched, and, when one is doing good work, from a certain point in time they come alive and start contradicting the author as well.

I would say I have sort of a natural gift for character, and following one person's point of view at a time, and dialogue, but I'm not naturally good at strong plot.

I don't really approach stories to make them different from other stuff I've seen, I just try to get into the character, into his or her head. Try to make it as funny, as scary or as wild as I can so that I really like it.

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

The action stuff is only good if you get the character stuff in there as well. Sometimes that get lost in amongst all the trying to make stuff blow up.

I seem to have to make my characters family before I can access their hearts in any way that matters.

I believe that stories find writers, writers don't find stories. With the 'Pendragon' series, I actually had multiple story ideas and decided that instead of writing them individually, I would create a character whose journey would thread them all together.