Laurie Graham Quotes

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

I think what good television does well is that it shows characters evolving.

And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.

Part of the reason I wanted to write a novel was that in fiction I could do something that's difficult to do in real life, which is to dwell on the stark details of the experience without really needing to create that narrative of redemption.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

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 love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

A certain luxury when you get to writing a novel is to have the space to have your characters just banter.

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.

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

I've always loved shows that combine both approaches - that have a mythology and a set of characters, whose stories develop and change, and where the relationships evolve and fracture.

I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.

After a while, the character sort of took over.

I'm always sorry to finish a book, to let go of characters I love, people I've struggled to understand for years, people who evolve before me.

My life needed to be saved. Not just Foxy. That's my character. That's my work. Inga is a person.

I don't plot my novels - I move along with my characters.

Although when I start a novel I know how it will begin and end, I like to let the people within the story take me on a journey between those points without having a fixed plan.

What I discovered is I don't like to repeat lead characters because one of the most pleasurable things in a book to me is learning about the lead.

You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.

Filmmaking is always sort of building a mosaic of this arc of what the character is going through.

For me to have the opportunity to stay with one character for, God willing, a long period of time, is really exciting.

You have 22 episodes to start from zero to hero; you can really take a nice, big, long arc. In a film, it's tough to do that - you only have 90 minutes.

I feel like if a film is well-written, then the character's arc is complete. There really is very little room to expand on that afterwards.

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character.

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.