Jennifer Haigh Quotes

I do a lot better if I sit around and think about a character for a couple of months.

I'm always determined that as a novelist I'm going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.

That's the way it happens - some characters you set out to use, some are happy accidents. As long as it works, it doesn't really matter how you got them.

After a while, the characters I'm writing begin to feel real to me. That's when I know I'm heading in the right direction.

I never have particular actors planned when I'm in the process of writing.

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.

I find it very hard to sit down and create an idea or especially a new character on command. Usually my characters evolve by accident out of some story context.

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.

Sometimes I'll get a premise, you know, for a book. In fact, I get those quite often. And I don't commit to it until I really know the voice of that character. It's almost as if the character is speaking to me.

I work out the other bits, too, but I need to know what I look like, very early on. And then it's like a template; I'll fill that person out. If I get that out of the way, then I'm all right.

You have to be able to toss the thing out. You can't fall in love with your characters, and you have to know when to fight - and when to quit.

When you're a writer, if you're very lucky, you create these characters that you fall in love with, and you feel like they're guiding you rather than you guiding them.

I don't think in genres. Once I get a germ of an idea I wait for it to die! And if it refuses to die and keeps coming back, I start thinking more about it. Then come the world and the characters. I wait to get bored and if I don't get bored- then I start building on them.

There's some of me in all my characters.

Imagining what a character will do in a given situation - it's like an equation, and working it out is a marathon rather than a sprint.

There are fragments of me in all my characters.

Often what happens with the writing is that you know where you want to start and you know where you want to end, but the journey is never quite what you predict because the characters take on a life on their own.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

I don't ever really know where I get my characters from.

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

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.

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?

How I work is I work from of very character-driven place. And I trust the writers.

One of the greatest things about 'Continuum' is how great the writing is; our writing room is one of the most talented ones I've ever had. It really helps me as far as character development because they paint a very descriptive picture of who the characters are while still letting us have freedom to put in our own ideas.