Geraldine McCaughrean Quotes

Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.

I think art, especially literature, has the particular power to immerse the viewer or reader into another world. This is especially powerful in literature, when a reader lives the experience of the characters. So if the characters are human and real enough, then readers will feel empathy for them.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations.

I think the key divide between the interactive media and the narrative media is the difficulty in opening up an empathic pathway between the gamer and the character, as differentiated from the audience and the characters in a movie or a television show.

Besides, most of the books I like involve people I could never play in a million years.

The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.

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.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

Songs are like movies to me, and so you put yourself in the movie. You become a character in the movie.

We willingly enter fictional worlds where we cheer our heroes and cry for friends we never had.

What I love about my work is that I'm forced to look through my character's eyes.

This is the beauty of fiction. We may not like these characters, but we inhabit them.

If people don't connect to Eric Carter's struggles, I'm sure they'll find a character in this series to connect to. That's ultimately what it's about for me.

Television is about identifying with the characters.

In all my characters, I try to find an iota of myself, and in Castle, I found a lot. He gets away with a lot, so that's fun.

The radio is good for taking somebody else's experience and making you understand what it would be like. Because when you don't see someone, but you hear them talking - and, uh, that is what radio is all about - it's like when someone is talking from the heart. Everything about it conspires to take you into somebody else's world.

If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.

If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.

Action-adventure, that genre, only works for me if you can care about the characters. If the hero's not taking some kind of a journey, then there are no stakes - and no stakes, then you don't care if he lives or dies, wins or loses.

The first thing, when I read the script, is that I need to care about what happens and feel compelled by the story and engaged by the characters. It needs to resonate with me, even if what the characters are going through is not something that I have experienced in my life. I have to feel like it has some sort of meaning to me.

In terms of the characters I think are really fun to play, a lot of times it's someone in my head saying 'I know that woman.'

I always have a contract with a character. Even when he's unappealing. The contract is to give him his due. To tell his story. And to keep his secrets.

A good novel is an out-of-self experience. It lifts you off the ground so that you have the sensation of flying. It says, 'Look at the world around you; learn from the people in these pages, neither quite me nor quite you, how life is lived in so many different ways.'

Acting isn't necessarily pretending. It's storytelling. It's giving someone your perspective on something.