A Quote by Emma Healey

I used to say I wasn't interested in writing about characters. — © Emma Healey
I used to say I wasn't interested in writing about characters.
I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something, and if possible in making a "killing." They are interested in being a writer not in writing. . . If this is what you are interested in, I am not going to be much use to you.
When I'm writing it's as if I'm the observer. It's as if that computer screen there -it used to be the typewriter - just kind of dissolves and there's this whirling tunnel of mist and there's a kind of proscenium arch, and then there are my characters, and they say what they say, and I laugh sometimes in surprise at what they say.
I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.
I think that's the kind of women that people are interested in. They're interested in strong women characters who are stronger than the male characters sometimes, in some ways. That's what's interesting and attractive about women.
The reader has information about the characters that the characters themselves don't have. We all have our secret sides. Even I come to understand things about the characters only through the writing process, as I am going along.
I remember how surprised I was when my first novel was about to be published and I was informed that I could be sued for anything any one of my characters said. 'But I often don't agree with what they say,' I protested. The lawyer was not interested in the clear distinction I make between my own voice and the voices of my characters. Neither, I have found, are many of my readers.
I'm interested in extrovert characters, people who are doing something. But I used to only be able to photograph people I was interested in or attracted to, either psychologically or physically. That all changed when I did the 'Go Sees.'
So the fact that there's someone who's planning what happens to the characters, writing it down, means that the characters always have a fate. And when we think about fate, we tend think of it as the thing we would have if we were literary characters, that is, if there were somebody out there, writing us.
I feel very much a part of what I'm writing about, and I'm writing about things that concern me on a daily basis. I'm not really interested in writing musical diaries, if you know what I mean.
I have things that I'm interested in, and I'm not really interested in writing about anything that I'm not interested in. But it's important to me to be able to see it from a different perspective, and add something new to the whole picture.
I always say that characters must drive plots, never the reverse. Writing about large-scale events creates the risk that the scope of the events themselves can overwhelm the characters. I emphatically do not want that. That was the only trepidation I felt when I started 'The Twilight War.'
Remember when you were a kid, and everyone used to say, 'Would you rather be interested or interesting?' And to me, it was always like, 'Interested!' How is that even a question? I feel very lucky that I'm just really, really interested in a lot of things.
It's funny, I used to say on 'That 70?s Show', you could really put us in any decade, and it was about the people and the characters and that we cared about each other.
It's funny, I used to say on 'That 70's Show', you could really put us in any decade, and it was about the people and the characters and that we cared about each other.
So much of writing is about what characters don't say, and in the early drafts, sometimes things get overwritten.
As soon as your mind knows that it's on and it's supposed to produce some lines, either it doesn't or it produces things that are very predictable. And that's why I say I'm not interested in writing something that I thought about. I'm interested in discovering where my mind wants to go, or what object it wants to pick up.
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