Mahershala Ali Quotes

Everybody has parents. As a dramatist, whenever you write a character, you must write their parents as well, even if the parents aren't there.

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 try to research or make up for myself what happened in any character's life. From when he was born until the first page of the script. I fill in the blanks.

I tend to come up with people more than situations - most of my books start with a character.

As a writer, you understand how hard it is to build up backstory for characters, so you can have impactful moments. You have to build toward something and then pay it off.

For every character, I think about who they are, their story, what they are, and who they were before their game started. What was their life like? Where did they grow up? What were their parents like?

I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters - to make them personalities.

I try to create characters that I am fascinated by on some level or intrigued by or can't stand.

I'm about my characters.

Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there.

What I'm really trying to do is create unique characters.

To me, it all comes down to things being character-driven. It's hard for me to look beyond that. CG and all this cool stuff - so be it. But to me, it pretty much begins and ends with character-driven plots rather than technologically-driven plots.

Often the starting point for characters, for me, is finding a little, most minor detail, and I'll go from there.

When I'm breaking in a character like Jessica Jones, I have this amazing opportunity to create her backstory. It's all of the work that happens before I'm ever on camera... Writing 'Bonfire' was like doing all of that fun stuff; it was like 300 pages of prep work.

I think I try to look at all my films and break them down because, at the end of the day, it's about creating characters that you like.

A new character is like bringing a new human being into your life.

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

That's not the part of the story that I'm interested in, anyway. The part that I'm interested in is all the personal stuff. I tried to base the powers on family archetypes.

I mean, can I really create a full, three-dimensional character? I don't know anymore. I'm certainly going to try.

One of the things that separates a good genre movie from a bad genre movie, I always think, ironically, is when you care about the people. The dime a dozen ones are where you don't have any awareness of the character.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

What makes characters real are details, and if you're crafting a person from scratch, you're probably not going to pay as much attention to a question like, 'Does this person bite their nails?'

You've got to leave the reader with more than just a name and a costume - they need to know who the character is, what they're like, what kind of attitude they have, what sort of role they play.

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.

Don't start writing your novel until you know your characters very, very well. What they'd do if they saw somebody shoplifting. What they were like at school. What shoes they wear. Spend days - weeks, months - being them until they thicken up and start to breathe.