Look Quote by Mike Bartlett

Your job as a writer is to find storylines, narrative structures, and characters to show the things that you believe rather than saying them…

— Philipp Meyer

Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.

— Alan Furst

When you realize the writers start writing to who you are, you're basically reading reviews of yourself. And then it becomes this cyclical nightmare…

— Ben Feldman

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…

— Andrew Greeley

So much of writing is about what characters don't say, and in the early drafts, sometimes things get overwritten.

— Peter Hedges

When you're writing, I think a big part of writing comes out of an attempt to understand yourself. You're dealing with emotions and thoughts…

— Sheila Heti

In real life, people are constantly saying one thing and doing another, but if you write your characters that way, the story becomes too…

— Jessica Cutler

What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.

— Joan Didion

Other writers know what you're going through, what you're talking about when you write.

— Andrew Sean Greer

Part of me becomes the characters I'm writing about. I think readers feel like they are there, the way I am, as a result.

— Louis Sachar

When the stories come easily and the writing process doesn't feel laboring, that's usually a good sign for me.

— David E. Kelley

I'm always determined that as a novelist I'm going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.

— Chris Cleave