Deborah Moggach Quotes

My first job is to write the characters as full and authentic people as well as I can.

It's hard to know whether certain characters come to life or not, they either come to have their own life or they don't. I've written many things in which the characters just remain inert.

When you create a show, and create characters, these people are like children to you.

I love making characters real and believable, through my own experience and choices.

Knowing that Gene and Morgan were playing those roles made it much easier to put the script together-we knew who we were writing it for. It took some mystery away.

I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters - to make them personalities.

Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.

My characters live inside my head for a long time before I actually start a book about them. Then, they become so real to me I talk about them at the dinner table as if they are real. Some people consider this weird. But my family understands.

It's very hard to connect with a character when you haven't gotten a sense of who they are.

When you're writing fiction, you're in every character 'cause you can't help it.

Sometimes a character is really based on research that you do. Other times it's just based on your imagination or perhaps your conversation with the director. Or sometimes all of the above. It depends on the movie and character.

The more I love the character, the harder it is to get it wrong. I have to get to a point that I can speak for them.

I always say I write my own novels and the characters don't take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, 'What is he or she like,' and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.

The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.

There's a bizarre insistence on how a story should be. 'The protagonist must be sympathetic!' they say. Whatever that means. I never engage in that discussion. I never use that word, 'sympathetic.' I just know 'interesting.'

Don't start writing your novel until you know your characters very, very well. What they'd do if they saw somebody shoplifting. What they were like at school. What shoes they wear. Spend days - weeks, months - being them until they thicken up and start to breathe.

Once you start writing a character visually, you're in trouble.

I try to ground most of my characters in reality somehow. That's kind of what I bring to the table.

As a writer, I always think about who my prototype actors are, in my brain. It's helpful, as a writer, to think about that.

Some writers can produce marvelous plots without planning it out, but I can't. In particular I need to know the structure of a novel: what's going to happen in each chapter and each scene.

All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.

When I create a character, it happens in layers. The more I write and revise, the better I understand the characters.

One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.

I try to begin with a strong grasp of my characters. Even if it's schematic, I need it clear in my head who these people are.

I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.