From Ernest Hemingway's stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.
When I was really young. My sister and I would create different characters with our Barbie dolls - I'd be the crazy diva Barbie and she'd be the homeless Barbie.
I love accents - I wish I could find an accent for every one of my characters. It makes it so much easier when I don't have to hear my own voice.
Storylines are how characters create the plots involved in their stories.
My favorite TV couple is Edith and Archie Bunker. Because they were such individuals that I can't imagine anyone else playing them. And I think that Archie was one of the greatest characters ever on television. Even with his flaws, you loved him.
You don't do characters that are the same as you, otherwise why bother to act?
Politics and self-interest have been so uniformly connected, that the world, from being so often deceived, has a right to be suspicious of public characters.
I think it's very important to write a demythologized woman character. My characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be.
Don't accept the excuse of complexity. A lot of people will tell you, this is too challenging, this is too complicated, yeah well I know other people simplify but that's not for me, this is a complicated business. They're wrong. You can change the world in 140 characters.
If you look at that incredible burst of fantastic characters that emerged in the late 19th centuryearly 20th century, you can see so many of the fears and hopes of those times embedded in those characters. Even in throwaway bits of contemporary culture you can often find some penetrating insights into the real world around us.
In India we have a readymade world of fantasy available in Indian mythology. And this is why we see such a surfeit of characters drawn from mythology. I don't think it's because the present day humanity is soulless.
What I wanted to do [in Allied] was get two characters who fall in love for real, across the barricade, and then it transcends the war.
I don't think plot as a plot means much today. I'd say that everybody has seen every plot twenty times. What they haven't seen is characters and their relation to one another. I don't worry much about plot anymore.
When I write a book, I don't have a plan or an outline. The characters move the action, and the action develops the characters. When I write a book, I become an actor, really, taking the role of the person who is speaking or acting at the time, and so their reactions to whatever they see are my reactions.
In writing a series of stories about the same characters, plan the whole series in advance in some detail, to avoid contradictions and inconsistencies.
If a writer is true to his characters they will give him his plot. Observations must play second fiddle to integrity.
It's the writer's job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all.
I always wanted to be a fireman, a cop, an Indian chief, a doctor, a lawyer. I always wanted to be all these things, so I am drawn to these kinds of characters.
I don't have to live the lives of my characters to write about them. It's about really putting yourself in their shoes.
In general, watching children's television is a dark and surreal descent into madness where the characters on the screen talk directly to you.