A Quote by August Wilson
When I first started writing plays I couldn't write good dialogue because I didn't respect how black people talked. I thought that in order to make art out of their dialogue I had to change it, make it into something different. Once I learned to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I let them start talking.
Related Quotes
Once I started to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I just let them start talking.
I didn't always value the ways black people talked. I thought, in order to make art out of it, you had to change it.
You can make bad writing 'OK,' but... you really need to start with a good script and with characters that are three-dimensional and with great dialogue. It's a difficult lesson to learn because good writing is hard to come by, but it's definitely worth chasing.
I have so many different projects, I hear voices in my head - the characters talking all at once - and I have to write to make them stop.
Very, that show is crazy. It was like doing finals every week. It was interesting. I really learned a lot. The dialogue is so technical. I was so impressed watching the other actors and how they managed, so I studied them. And I was blown away thinking: "How do they do that? How do they put that extra spin on the complicated dialogue to make it interesting?
I've learned how to look at things and not judge them, but respect them and use it in a way that people understand that I respect them, show them love and respect their reality.
I like writing dialogue - I can hear my characters so clearly that writing dialogue often feels as much like transcribing something as it does like creating it.
I have too much respect for the characters I play to make them anything but as real as they can possibly be. I have a great deal of respect for all of them, otherwise I wouldn't do them. And I don't want to screw them by not portraying them honestly.
Okay, this is Fran Lebowitz. She gave an interview once for the Paris Review about trying to write fiction and saying that fiction writers start talking about how characters are talking to them, and it's crazy, she's never had that. And I also thought, I'm never gonna be able to do this, because I didn't feel that for a really long time.
I respect my competitors, you know, I get respect back from them. I respect people out there who pay for their tickets to come watch us compete. And I respect the reporters because they've got to come out here and tell a good story. That's what it is. It's just a cycle of respect.
It's supposed to be a good thing that he's got this dialogue started. To me, I think, I just took away something bad from it, because, apparently he had to do this not to convince them of anything. To educate them.
I like to let the story flesh itself out, and usually, the characters make their own decisions as things get under way. Dialogue especially seems to write itself once I'm familiar with the characters and their backgrounds.
It was my idea that if you started any kind of business, you should begin somewhere near where you hoped to end. In other words, if I wanted to make really good clothes to order, I would start out making good, and therefore expensive, clothes to order. If I started making inexpensive clothes, I thought probably I'd die making them.
The problem with being a writer/director: unless you're really disciplined, you start adding projects, and you have to make time to make them. Because you have to write them... no one else is writing them for me.
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.
At its best, writing is a dialogue. It's one of the things I love about children's: the fact that this dialogue is really there from the get-go, from the start of writing.
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