A Quote by Elizabeth Strout
I actually see myself in all my characters. In order to imagine what it feels like to be another person I have to use my own experiences and responses to the world.
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Imagine yourself in the scene. See what there is to be seen. Listen to the sounds. Touch the world. Smell the air. Taste it. Use all of your senses. Then evoke those experiences for the reader. If you give the audience the flavor, they'll flesh out the moment in their own imaginations.
You can't write good characters if you can't imagine what it's like being in another person's skin. And if you can imagine that, you naturally want other people's lives to be better. You want to make that happen.
Like most people, I find my own experiences - and my emotional responses to those experiences - fascinating and mysterious, even those that are a bit shaming and a little repellent.
When we enter a new situation in life and are confronted by a new person, we bring with us the prejudices of the past and our previous experiences of people. These prejudices we project upon the new person. Indeed, getting to know a person is largely a matter of withdrawing projections; of dispelling the smoke screen of what we imagine he is like and replacing it with the reality of what he is actually like.
It's not that people like sad movies that make us feel like, "Oh, my god, what a bummer." We like emotionally moving experiences, where you feel like a slightly different person and you see the world a little different, after you finish. It lets you see your own life, in a different way, and it actually makes you feel really good. And even though there might be sad content making this happen, the feeling that you're left with is one that is quite good, quite hopeful, clarifying and uplifting.
If you're playing somebody who is not you, then you can imagine that you are that person. You can feel like he feels, move like he moves, look like he looks - in your own mind.
I don't pretend to be wise, but I am observing, and I see a great deal more than you'd imagine. I'm interested in other people's experiences and inconsistencies, and, though I can't explain, I remember and use them for my own benefit.
A writer can't just be well-educated or good at research; to build a living, breathing world with interesting characters, you have to write from the gut. I'm not saying you have to live your life like a fantasy adventure. The trick is the ability to synthesize your own everyday experiences into your fiction. Infuse your characters with believable emotions and motivations. Infuse your world with rich sensory detail. For that you have to be in touch with your own existence and your own soul, the dark and the light of it.
Snapshots that have been taken of me working show something I was not aware of at all, that over and over again I'm holding my own body or my own hands exactly like the person I'm photographing. I never knew I did that, and obviously what I'm doing is trying to feel, actually physically feel, the way he or she feels at the moment I'm photographing them in order to deepen the sense of connection.
I'm a woman, a mother, a daughter, a sister. I'm a real person operating in the world. For me to discuss the most private thing feels wrong. It feels like I'm betraying myself and my children.
Symptoms like anxiety, depression, aggression, alcohol or drug use, are responses to physical and emotional pain that has its roots in traumatic experiences from childhood and later in life.
With social media and advertising and filters and FaceTune-ing it's hard to even to know what's real and what's not. So to see an image of a woman where you can actually see her face and her skin texture and she's still polished and beautiful or even glamorous with a nighttime look, but it still feels like a real person. I feel like that's the kind of beauty I want to applaud and align myself with.
When you can clearly see yourself being there, you can see much more clearly how to get there. You can imagine the path to your dreams, and then start to actually walk it. Play an active role in your own future. Imagine with passion and detail how you'd most like it to be.
Half the fun is getting to play dress-up and imagine what it's like to be this other person. If you're not excited about a part where you get to use your imagination, then what's the point in doing it? It'll be just another job. Also, Director Michael Pressman and I see eye-to-eye with Marie.
I post on Twitter regularly, and when I checked my followers, I saw that my own characters were following me. They sounded eerily like my characters would actually sound. It was a very surreal thing to see come to life digitally!
Life experience. I can talk it up, vow to broaden my horizons, but I’m still limited to the experiences with my life. How can a person understand an experience that lies completely outside her own? She can see it, feel it, imagine what it would be like to live it, but it’s no different from seeing a movie on a screen and saying, “Thank God that’s not me”.
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