Lulu Wang Quotes

Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.

Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.

But protagonists are protagonists and heroes are heroes.

The genealogy of fictional characters can become an obsession, like train-spotting, and should be firmly resisted.

I prefer being the protagonist.

The librarian, the warrior, the free spirit... archetypes are a great jumping off point to help clarify where we want to go with a character.

I don't really think of Odo as a heroic lead, but that's nice if you do.

A true nature is a gloomy monolith, sort of like that old black rotary phone that I had to sing 'Happy Birthday' to Grandpa on. But novelists, damn us, still need true natures - so we can give them to our protagonists. And so readers can vaguely predict how they'll behave when we trap them in 'situations' that they can't IM their way out of.

For every book that I write... I develop a history for each person and make sure they are well rounded and flawed. You have to know everything about them from their shoe size, to where they went to school, to what their first pet was, to what they like to eat, to what they want out of life.

I'm drawn particularly to stories that evolve out of the character of the protagonist.

Even in horror novels where you know most characters aren't going to make it to the end, it's crucial to have fully fleshed-out characters. If you don't do that, the reader doesn't care what happens to them.

When the audience first sees Cooper talking into his tape recorder at the beginning of 'Twin Peaks,' I think that's the greatest introduction to a character I've seen in my career. It tells you everything about the guy right there in a few minutes as well as bringing up a whole load of questions.

In 'Me Before You,' the two characters popped into my head fully formed, which is really strange and unusual. Other books, I sit on them for two or three months. I have a whole routine: I buy a nice book; I hand-write all their characteristics. I put them through little tests just to see how they would react to things.

It is scary for an actor when you get hired as a lead. No matter what the plot is, it is your job to do something interesting enough to make them want to get inside the lead character's head.

When I'm writing a woman character, I don't think, 'What would a woman do?' I just think, 'What would this character do in this situation?'

I'll tell you what I really enjoy. We all go to the movies, we all watch television, we know what they're about, how they work. When the main character is a cop or a spy, it's very exciting, but I also very much enjoy when the main characters are nobodies - a trucker.

I have absolutely no interest in playing the young male lead around which a story happens.

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

I do this a lot with names. I'll start with a name, and then for some reason he won't talk much, or he's older than I pictured him just because of a name I give him. So then I finally get the right name, and I can't shut the guy up. This always happens. There's always a character who gives me trouble that way.

I've made a career writing about fictitious anti-heroes. To create these worlds, I've spent a lot of time with active members on both sides of the law. And if I had to pick the most interesting of the two, the choice is obvious - we all love the guys in black.

I like complicated characters.

I try to begin with a strong grasp of my characters. Even if it's schematic, I need it clear in my head who these people are.

There are a lot of techniques for developing a character.

Everyone deserves to be the hero of a novel.

I think the character does tend to suit an episodic thing, because what's fun about him is that he doesn't care about anyone else, and it's very difficult for a main character - a lead character - in a movie to not care about anybody else.