In real life, people are constantly saying one thing and doing another, but if you write your characters that way, the story becomes too hard to follow.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Characters are so important to a story that they actually decide where the story is going. When I write, I know my characters. I know how things are going to end, and I know some important incidents along the way.
To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.
You can't really write until the characters kind of show up one day and tell you what they're going to say. You start to hear the rhythm of the way the people talk, and then it becomes easier.
I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.
Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.
I'm always writing about character first. Plot, such as it is, comes from the characters.
You can have the greatest characters in the world and write beautifully, but if nothing's happening, the story falls on its face pretty quickly.
The goal is to have every character take on a life of his or her own. Sometimes characters will come into the story that I haven't planned.
Writing is a mysterious process, and many ideas come from deep within the imagination, so it's very hard to say how characters come about. Mostly, they just happen.
Unlike life, you've got more or less complete control over what's going on in your stories. That's not to say you can make characters do whatever you want them to - they usually have a life of their own if you've done your job properly.