Janet Fitch Quotes

I think love is a great catalyst for many characters to further the story or their own growth.

Every paragraph should accomplish two goals: advance the story, and develop your characters as complex human beings.

You are always working towards the moments in which characters experience reckonings or insight or change. I like to track them past those moments.

The reader wants to see something happen between pages one and four hundred, and nothing happens if the characters don't change.

One pleasure of working on a trilogy is watching characters warp and grow over time.

I tend to relate to a character in terms of the arc: what's interesting is where he starts versus where he ends up.

I think everybody goes through changes, and the same should be said for fictional characters, especially ones that you follow on television.

There's something pretty awesome about staying with a character and growing.

I love doing a series because you get to see changes in a character and see her grow. It's a journey with change, and you don't get to see that long-term type of development with just a film.

I think what people watch television for is the emotional continuity, from episode to episode, and feeling that the experience that they had, four episodes ago, has actually been building to an episode that comes later, and knowing that the characters are growing, as a result of that, and making mistakes, is really, really important to the way people connect to television.

But keep characters in propinquity long enough and a story will always develop a plot.

If a scene doesn't work on three levels - it's not advancing the story, the characters, and telling me something new - then put it in the trash.

Changers are characters who alter in significant ways as a result of the events of your story. They learn something or grow into better or worse people, but by the end of the story they are not the same personalities they were in the beginning. Their change, in its various stages, is called the story's emotional arc.

Every single movie that I've ever done has affected my life; I always feel more changed by a character than I affect them or change them, always. I mean, that's just kind of the way it is.

TV is longer form, and that's sometimes a positive, and sometimes a more challenging thing. As an actor, you want to be able to have your character develop or transform in some way. When you're acting on a show over the course of multiple seasons, you get to watch a character really grow and change, and go from one place to an entirely other place.

Every story starts with an idea, but it is the characters that move this idea forward.

Rule of storytelling: When a character is shoved against a wall, shove them against a wall harder.

Personally, my taste is towards development of a character, as well as the resolution of a story plot. I like to find both, if I can.

I suspect that the theme, the nature of the characters, and the method of getting from the beginning of the play to the end is already established in the unconscious.

Getting the audience to cry for the Terminator at the end of T2, for me that was the whole purpose of making that film. If you can get the audience to feel emotion for a character that in the previous film you despised utterly and were terrified by, then that's a cinematic arc.

Any plot you impose on your characters will be onomatopoetic: PLOT. I say don't worry about plot. Worry about the characters. Let what they say or do reveal who they are, and be involved in their lives, and keep asking yourself, Now what happens? The development of relationship creates plot.

So in the drafting process, whenever I would discover something about what my character wanted or didn't want, I immediately just wanted my character to admit to that so I could get to the next, more interesting level in the story.

The character has to have some kind of arch. The character has to go through an event, and be changed by the human event.

I have done scenes as Harvey Two-Face. It's interesting. I won't tell you exactly what we're going for, but I think that I can say that it will use all of today's technology to create this character. He's going to be interesting, and I think that's what makes this character important in the movie-you get to see him as he was before, as in the comic books. Harvey is a very good guy in the comic books. He's judicious. He cares. He's passionate about what he loves and then he turns into this character. So you will see that in this film.

The cool thing about doing films and being different characters is that it's new everyday and new every project. So, you're always learning something different and you get to do research.