Cry Baby is a character so I think that the next album is going to be about a specific thing in her life or another place in her world. It's going to be a bit deeper into a bigger picture.
Detailing and backstories are so important; only they draw you into the life of a character.
We read the [Dracula] scripts, but Jess [De Gouw] and I are completely taken out of the hunts and anything with Van Helsing. We're just living our lives, as our characters.
If it's present in the life of the character, I'll write about it. Kitchen, bedroom, church, I'll follow a character wherever they go.
Even in novels where the love relationship isn't the focus, I feel like it's often there, and the background is some barometer of whether this is a happy or sad story or whether this is a successful or unsuccessful life.
Show me a character whose life arouses my curiosity, and my flesh begins crawling with suspense.
I try to construct some kind of backstory for my character so that I have an idea of the life of that character - not just from the moment when the scene starts, but from before.
But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel ... it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.
If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.
Joss Whedon, he is really hands-on, and he wants every character to have a life on and off screen.
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.
The way I write my shows, every character is its own organic thing. No character has a life at all until I see it played by somebody.
