Terry Pratchett Quotes

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

In television writing, you want to hear what the characters say as opposed to giving them something to say. It's the same with the cartoons.

Especially when I write, I want to get out of people's heads and have them speak and have them get dressed and have them go to work.

What I look for in any character, good or bad, is whether I can hear him speak. If I can imagine him that clearly, then I can write about him.

The trick is to try and justify every word on the page and make sure my character is the man who would say that.

So much of comics are dictated by characters talking to one another - or in focused spaces where 'the camera' has to stay in pretty close on what's going on.

With musical theatre, although there are rules, they're so different to the ones I feel like I have accidentally been ingrained with writing pop music. The main point is to tell the story. You just have to make sure the character's voice is strong and the storytelling is strong.

Whether it is television or film, the character on the page has to speak to me.

Producing is figuring out how to make each character have a distinct voice, how to make the story twist and turn - that's the biggest challenge.

It always comes down to script and characters.

A script writer usually manipulates his characters in accordance to the script.

I write in character a lot.

I always try to make my characters people, and yet I always want to entertain.

When I'm creating characters, I definitely think of theme songs. Writing for me is very visual, so I sometimes think of it in terms of a movie with a soundtrack, and try to transfer that to words.

I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.

For me, the dialogue is the easiest part of writing. It just always seems so obvious what a character will say. Maybe it's because I talk too much!

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

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.

Movie characters rarely get to think out loud or talk very much about their emotions. Instead they have to, very briefly, show their feelings through their action or through dialog.

Once you've established where you are, you go to the character and elaborate on expressions and action.

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

An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else.

Whether you're writing a horror show or a James Bond film, I think what bubbles beneath is interesting characterization. The colors that emerge through storytelling is what a dramatist does. There's always got to be something bubbling underneath that will erupt at some point.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

The decision for me was whether to have 'The Father' be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.