There's no such thing as a perfect person, so it makes no sense to write a perfect person. I don't know any author who'd try. And we write characters, not representations of groups.
I've been fascinated by the world ever since I read 'Kitchen Confidential' by Anthony Bourdain. I've watched 'Top Chef' and watched interviews with chefs on 'Charlie Rose'... I thought they're really intriguing characters, and they really encapsulate that tension between vision and commerce, art and commerce.
The great thing about working in cable is that, since the season is truncated - we only do 12 shows - the writers are more at ease in terms of mapping out the trajectory of the story and the characters.
When we don't have all the details about our characters, we have to make it up to fill in all the details. So, for me, writing and acting go hand in hand.
I think, as a choreographer and an action designer, you're constantly giving your characters problems to overcome. That's what makes it fun for choreography. But it also makes it fun for the audience to see them solve those puzzles and how they are as a human being.
I did 'Malice,' 'Sommersby,' and 'Sleepless in Seattle,' and they're as disparate characters as I've ever played. But somehow, there was that thing - they were all second male leads, so they all didn't get the girl in some weird way.
Now, admittedly, Twitter can be entertaining on occasion, as it turns out that 140 characters offers a great chance to be misunderstood - and an even greater chance one will expose his inner troglodyte.
I don't think there is a guy that played more gay characters than I have done in my life.
I feel Arjun is one of the central characters of 'Mahabharata' and people have lots of expectations from me when I started working on the show.
I think the idea is to try and understand everything about the characters and where the character is coming from, from their point of view, why they say what they do. And not, 'Oh, but I would never say that. Why does the character say that?' But then making it as personal as possible.
The black community wants to buy things and want to see themselves portrayed in a certain way. And if they don't like what they see, then they won't spend their money. Everyone's not gonna always relate to Captain America; everyone is not going to always relate to Thor. A lot of characters just don't speak to them.
I like to push characters to extremes so they have to make really tough decisions and there is no life more extreme than that of an athlete.
I have this horrible weakness. I fall in love with my characters. 'Suspect' started as a one-shot, but I just love Maggie so much, and I love Maggie and Scott and what they have going.
I think characters are most terrifying when they're relatable. It's best when your most horrible characters make sense, and are believable. That's when a movie is most terrifying.
I have no issues in talking about my personal life, but I feel it takes away from my career and my characters, especially when a film is about to release.
I feel I should never do passive characters. They don't work for me.
There are two questions that you ask yourself as a writer, and one of them is, 'But why?' The question that takes the book forward is, 'What if? What if x y or z happened? How would those characters react?'
I, as a fan of numerous TV shows and movies, know that people mess up. The characters that we love are not always going to act in the ways that we want them to. That's what makes them interesting.
The thing with videogame characters is that they tend to be really undercooked, and people don't take the time to really flesh them out. They don't treat them with the respect that a writer writing characters in any other medium would treat their character.
I was very fortunate that my first novel captivated the imaginations of so many readers who asked for a sequel. After that, one book led to another as I discovered other facets to my characters I wanted to investigate further.
You live vicariously through your characters.
'Titanic' made me want to tell stories... To have all these characters and costumes and have ambition and think big and have dreams... It came at a very troubled period of my life.
In terms of showing their emotions and acting on them, my women characters are a lot more advanced than the men.
One lesson I learned from 'The Monstrumologist' was never to get too attached to your own characters. That's harder in practice than in theory. At the end of the third book - which coincided with the end of my contract - I was an emotional wreck. I mourned Will Henry and Warthrop.
The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters.
I like dialogue in novels. I wanted to avoid laying history on with a trowel - appearing to be lecturing, as opposed to the characters lecturing their children or students. Dialogue can humanise the story and make it go down somewhat more smoothly.
One of the things I strive for is realism. I need to be as real as possible in the dilemmas my characters face.
If your character is just out there acting a fool, viewers are gonna say, 'Why am I watching this?' But if he's whispering, 'I don't really want to die,' there's a level of vulnerability cemented in these bad characters.
I hope we can see African American characters as the diva, as the villain, and also as the praying mother. We are all of those things. We tended to only be the best friend or the neighbor in everybody's sitcom.
Your characters can do the worst things on Earth - cut to a happy baby, it ends up being OK.
We writers of series fiction tend to idealize ourselves in our characters, giving them attributes we wish we possessed and ever more interesting lives.
Vampires are handy characters, as they can do double duty as monster/villains and the classic, misunderstood romantic hero.
I do feel more towards certain characters who have depth and intelligence.
It was a high-class problem burden, but it was still a burden on 'The Vampire Diaries,' in which we had this group of characters that we loved writing for so much and who had so much available story to tell.
Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing.
I always had a lot of confidence in my work and the unique flavor I like to bring to my characters, but you know I'm not a huge dreamer.
