When writers stop to sharpen pencils or get up and make coffee to procrastinate, they still stay in their heads with their characters. But when you zip over to read email or check your Facebook page, you get zapped out of the fictive dream. It's brutal on my writing.
To create characters, one must build background. And one of the tools we use is improvisation.
Even fictional characters sometimes receive unwarranted medical opinions. Doctors have diagnosed Ebenezer Scrooge with OCD, Sherlock Holmes with autism, and Darth Vader with borderline personality disorder.
This is one of his most human and most amusing and witty novels. The characters are very Indian. I decided that I wanted to do a comedy, so this was just the right one.
What we want to see is stories that are going to be honest stories about the characters that we're telling them about.
My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow.
My first job is to write the characters as full and authentic people as well as I can.
I think if you're too embroiled in the need to relate too closely to the character, then you start to judge the character for the audience rather than to present it to the audience for their enjoyment and them to mull over the questions that the characters present.
Your life is like a play with several acts. Some of the characters who enter have short roles to play, others, much larger. Some are villains and others are good guys. But all of them are necessary; otherwise, they wouldn't be in the play. Embrace them all, and move on to the next act.
I like characters with character, not just pretty faces. Anyway, I think people can be both grotesque and beautiful at the same time. Look at Mick Jagger in the seventies. Look at Angelina Jolie.
I would love to be in 'Downton Abbey.' That's the thing I thing many people would have a good laugh with me saying anything like that. I feel like that's the next phase of my career. To reprove to everyone that I can do things besides the crazy characters.
Until 'Moonlight,' I had never seen one black man cook for another on screen. But I wanted the characters to be free of 'groundbreaking' or 'never before.' We were ascribed those things. They weren't the point.
I made my living in comedy, but I'm not a silly person. I've got all these sides to me. Even in my movies that I've written myself, the characters sometimes border on great anger or nutsiness or other kinds of behavior. I'm not just doing fart jokes for two hours.
Everything is so funny in the movie. The funniest thing about the movie is the transformations they were able to make with the characters.
Over the years, people have asked me, 'Do you think there should be a separate category for acting in the digital realm? Or hybrid sort of awards for digital characters?' and so on. And I've always really maintained that I don't believe so.
Nothing, I find, has prepared me for the sight of my own characters walking about. A playwright or screenwriter must expect it; a novelist doesn't and naturally concludes that she has gone mad.
Ultimately, my books are not about the politics, although the toil and the struggle and the wars in Afghanistan have a significant impact on the lives of my characters.
There's definitely a fascination with crime stories and stories of characters acting out against authority.
Somewhere, the audience relates to my characters and their vulnerability. I believe they see themselves in me.
I grew up in a community where it was not the exception to be a good girl. It was sort of expected. And all of my friends were good girls too, and my boyfriends were good boys. Everybody was pretty nice. And that affects how I write my characters. There aren't very many bad guys in my novels.
I think a lot of times stereotypes come when there are disconnected white writers who maybe have two or three black friends, and they write black characters, and they put them in situations that are ridiculous.
So if you want to have a great video game-based movie you have to keep the mood of the game, use the normal character setup - but you have to flesh out the story and provide more background for the characters.
I've always loved film and wanted to work in film. I just love working and creating new characters, and trying different genres and different things. For me, I just love to work and I love movies.
I enjoy the writing process and producing; I enjoy seeing an idea come to fruition. I'm driven by very complex characters. You look at the pilot of 'Breaking Bad,' where there's so much depth to the character, you can't help but be invested when you watch.
I'm not going to let people who work in the United States Department of Justice have their characters be assailed without any basis.
I'm attracted to the underrated characters.
The only difference is that religion is much better organised and has been around much longer, but it's the same story with different characters and different costumes.
I've never really understood that. It's a funny thing; people sometimes accuse us of condescending to our characters somehow-that to me is kind of inexplicable.
I try not so much to create new characters and worlds but to create new game-play experiences.
I play characters that are pretty; I play characters that are sort of intimidating and confident, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm that.
If you read a book that's fiction and you get caught in the characters and the plot, and swept away, really, by the fiction of it - by the non-reality - you sometimes wind up changing your reality as well. Often, when the last page is turned, it will haunt you.
The characters do have a life of their own; it's weird.
Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes and always count their change when it is handed to them.
I always think that trying to push yourself as an actor in a direction that you've never been before, developing characters which are more difficult to get into the head of, or are more interesting and further away from yourself, is always a challenge. But, you want to take up that challenge and try your best.
I do not speak through my characters; it's not a ventriloquist act.
As a child, I was always drawn to heroic characters. I decided I wanted to act when I realised that Superman and all those gangsters and Indians were just real people in costume.
