Gene Wolfe Quotes

If you get the characters right you've done sometimes nearly half the work. I sometimes find I get the characters right then the characters will often help me write the book - not what they look like that's not very important - what people look like is not about their character. You have to describe the shape they leave in the world, how they react to things, what effect they have on people and you do that by telling their story.

You don't want to have a character say what's bothering him; you want to define characters by action.

It's dialogue that gives your cast their voices, and is crucial in defining their characters.

There are three types of actions : purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. Characters , to be immediate and apprehensible, must be presented by all three.

I like the discipline of writing a script. You can't go into the character's head - you have to find these creative ways to help externalize what they're thinking.

Once you have your character sitting right there in your head, all you really need to do is wind them up, put them down, and simply write down what they do, say, or think.

I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me.

By definition it uses and plays and delights in time. It delights in the interlacing of chronologies and the consequences of that interlacing. And those have personal and psychological expressions in a character. Aside from other issues of writing, psychological characterization is what narrative can do best.

You never want to be in a position where your reader feels like you're passing judgment on your own characters. Any novel where you feel like the author is talking to the reader over the characters' heads is in a bad place.

What I truly get excited about is not the genre of a movie or the size of a part - it's character. I like to find characters.

Usually, people write the characters into a box, and that's just not true to life.

Action is only really compelling when it reveals character - character revealed through action, and not action for its own sake.

I like to describe my characters as though they were all trapped in a glass box.

That's where everything starts, as an actor: you've gotta have great writing and great character development, and then you have really great materials to work from.

Character is plot, plot is character.

You want to have the experience. As far as the creative side, the more I do this, the more I know that it's all about the writing. You got on a film sometimes and it's sort of half-written, and they expect and think that the actor's job is to bring the extra part and the good part. It's not. We're good at saying what other people have written, but for the majority of it, that's about it, comedians aside. It's all in the writing. Whether that's dialogue or character, or whatever, it doesn't matter. As long as they've done something special, than you can do something special.

The easier you make it look, the more difficult it is. Creating characters out of nothing, and making them interesting - and that's another advice I would give to writers.

Whatever character you play, remember they are always doing something they are not just talking.

I would say plotting is the most difficult thing for me. Characterization is only hard because sometimes I feel I get so interested in it that I want to talk too much about the characters and that slows the story down. So I say, "Hey, people want to find out what's going to happen next, they don't want to listen to you spout off about this or that person." But I think even the bad guy deserves to tell his side of the story.

In terms of style, I think the memoirist should have a novelist's skill and all the elements of a novelist's toolbox. When I read a memoir, I want to really, deeply experience what the author experienced. I want to see the characters and hear the way they speak and understand how they think. And so in that way, writing a memoir feels similar to writing a novel.

In a sense, all actors are character actors, because we're all playing different characters. But a lot of the time - and I don't know, because I'm not a writer - but writers a lot of times write second- and third-tier characters better than they write primary characters. I guess they're more fun.

I always begin with a character or characters, and then try to think up as much action for them as possible.

I'm not a writer, inherently. Most of the writers I've met have stories they need to tell. I don't have that. I'm an interpreter. I like getting a script, seeing a character and thinking, "Oh, wow, I know what I can do with that."

I think the writing and the casting and all of that has so much to do with actors becoming their characters. I think if an actor is right for a role, casting sees that and the words that are on the page, depending on how it's written, can really help your character develop.

I love writing from enclosed spaces: you really learn about your characters when they have tight walls to push against.