W. E. B. Griffin Quotes

As an author you hope your characters have sparks but truly in the end they have minds of their own!

Because characters are your creations, you are the one who ultimately gets to decide their fate.

It is a wonderful thing in the process of writing when such paper characters are first sketched, and, when one is doing good work, from a certain point in time they come alive and start contradicting the author as well.

The characters do have a life of their own; it's weird.

Unlike life, you've got more or less complete control over what's going on in your stories. That's not to say you can make characters do whatever you want them to - they usually have a life of their own if you've done your job properly.

I'm interested in telling the character's story, not my beliefs, political or otherwise.

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don't need to be told what to do.

Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.

I definitely have character arcs in mind for each character unless I kill them.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

There is nothing that's been in any of my novels that, in my view, hasn't been either illuminating surroundings or defining a character or moving a plot.

My main problem with fiction is that once my characters get moving, you just have to follow them along and get out of the way of the story, but sometimes they pull me in too many directions, and I need to focus.

It was really fun to start writing movies because you could actually take characters whose voice you enjoy writing in and have actual things happen to them for more than five minutes. It was really fun to thread it together.

Since I don't outline my books very much, I feel like sometimes I don't have a choice in what the characters do; they just kind of take over sometimes.

My characters aren't chess pieces. I don't move them around some big board. I actually care about these fictitious people.

Sometimes as writers, we try and put narrative development above character development. We try to move our characters around like chess pieces that do our bidding. The problem with that is sometimes the characters do things they shouldn't do. Things that are inorganic.

If you're creating your character, you can have full ownership of the emotional range they go through. You can make bolder choices.

I don't want to make fictional characters who are perfect - that's a vanilla situation - but the fact is you are allowed to more carefully select and curate what it is you're going to explore.

I plot the first 5 or 6 chapters quite minutely, and also the end. So I know where I am going but not how I'm going to get there, which gives characters the chance to develop organically, as happens in real life as you get to know a person.

I take little bits and pieces of ideas that I may or may not believe in but I give them to this character and he runs with them. I have fun with however he handles the situation.

Writers often say that characters begin to write themselves, and I never used to believe that. I always thought that was complete hogwash.

If I'm practicing making up what the characters will do, it's never good. In fact, when I catch myself doing that, I try to get rid of that section, and try and let them start making the decisions.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.