Lena Andersson Quotes

That balance between involvement and detachment is what novelists do. It's the ideal relationship between a novelist and a character, I think, total involvement and identity and empathy, stopping short of being autobiographical - in my case, anyway - but also quite detached.

You spend so much time writing a character the way I did with Buddy Baker and then Green Arrow that you start to care about them. And you almost think of them as people, you know?

When I create characters, I create a world to inhabit and they begin to feel very real for me. I don't belong in a psych ward, I don't think, but they become very real, like my own family, and then I have to say goodbye, close the door, and work on other things.

I put a lot of myself into my characters when I write.

I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you're going to write them convincingly.

When I start a new novel, I often write 'test chapters' in different tenses and from different points of view in order to figure out which is best to tell the tale.

To write convincingly, I think you must be able to relate, in some way, to what a character is experiencing.

As I write, I try to be the character.

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

I find it an easy way into writing pieces is to think what the character's voice is like, and start from there.

The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.

For a writer it's a dream to sit and watch people as close as possible.

There is always going to be a little bit of me in each character.

When I'm writing a story, which takes me a year or more, I can feel my character living with me - they're responding to whatever funny, familial, or social situation I'm in, and I think about their responses constantly.

Every character a writer creates has some of themselves in it somewhere.

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.

For me as a writer, the story has always taken precedence over everything else. I have never sat down to write with broad, sweeping ideas in mind, and certainly never with a specific agenda.

Part of me becomes the characters I'm writing about. I think readers feel like they are there, the way I am, as a result.

All my characters have got a big slice of me in them. A big piece of me, because it's my dialogue and this is the way I think and talk.

Since I am first of all a character writer, that character's emotions are as vivid to me as my own. I always begin with an emotion after I have established a character in my mind. I feel what they feel. I guess that is why it comes across so strongly.

I write in a pretty straightforward way. I kind of sit down at page one and start writing.

I'm often asked how I write books, but I don't think my approach is suitable for everyone. If I walked into a creative writing class, all I could say to them was 'I tend to make it up as I go along.' I'm not sure that's brilliant advice.

I couldn't give 'Vikings' away - I mean, I love these people. And I'm not sure anyone else writing it would necessarily have the same feeling towards the characters that I do.