Author Empathy Quotes

I want to have compassion for my characters - I feel like I am the characters when I'm writing them.

I write from this tight third-person viewpoint, where each chapter is seen through the eyes of one individual character. When I'm writing that character, I become that character and identify with that character.

Don't write about a character. Become that character, and then write your story.

I'm not in the business of meddling with people's destinies - and yes, my characters are real people to me. They have histories and thoughts and yearnings and hurts and misgivings and pleasures that don't belong to me.

Given what I do to my characters, I'm not sure I'd want to meet any of them.

Even 'Posham Pa' is written by a woman so it's a perspective which I empathise with more.

I think, when I'm writing, I have a more clinical view than I do when I'm reading. I like pretending to be God and basically determining the fate of my characters. But as a reader, I'm a sucker. I'm very sentimental. I get upset when people that I like die. And yet I have killed off characters in my books quite heartlessly, and sometimes found that readers were very upset by it.

I am like my characters - sometimes even the female ones.

I always make a point of keeping the most pleasant-sounding name for the murderer. As he or she is bound to come to an unpleasant end, it seems the very least the author can do.

Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.

My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me.

I always sympathize with people who complain about the length of my books. It would take me a year to get through one of them.

Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book.

My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me, if that makes any sense.

My characters aren't chess pieces. I don't move them around some big board. I actually care about these fictitious people.

Sometimes when a character in a novel is difficult for me to enter, I sue something in myself or in my own life as a doorway into that character's mind and emotions.

Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.

You can be interested in a Jane Smiley novel whether or not anyone says a word. She enters into her characters' thoughts with great understanding and depth.

My readers - and I get 400 emails for a day, my readers normally they say, well, you understand me, and I answer, you do understand me also. We are in the same level.