A Quote by Jacqueline Woodson
When I'm writing flawed characters, I just think about my own flaws.
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With my physicality and my face, I don't think I could pull off a completely righteous guy. There's something devious about my eyes. I like characters with flaws and to see how they overcome those flaws. I want to play real people, and they're flawed, not perfect.
During all of my writing career - this includes when I was writing plays and my other screenplays - I don't recall ever writing a negative character, which does not mean that my characters aren't flawed or do not make mistakes. In actual fact, they all are quite flawed.
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.
There's a remarkable amount of sexism on TV. When male characters are flawed, they're interesting, deep and complex. But when female characters are flawed, they're just a mess. It's good to put more flawed but interesting female characters out there because it promotes equality.
I think it's interesting playing characters who are flawed and make mistakes because we all have - no one's just one thing - no one is just bad or just good - so I like finding flawed characters and playing with their redeeming qualities, whether you play it outwardly or not. I think that one of the reasons I'm an actor is that I love people and I love finding out who they are and why they do the things they do, so it is fun to play those kinds of characters.
Also, in my acting, I feel very much like a storyteller, exploring the flaws of the characters that I interpret. I look for the imperfections, and I love a character that is just so flawed.
I love flawed characters, male or female, and I only want to talk about flawed characters, really, in what I do.
I work very hard at creating complex characters, a mix of positives and negatives. They are all flawed. I believe flaws are almost universal, and they help us understand, sympathise and, paradoxically, feel closer to such characters.
The challenge in writing a show that's about people and their flaws is that it can easily tip over - okay, I'll sometimes watch something, and there will be characters that are written in a way that I'll know that the writer just hates human beings. They're expressing this misanthropic point of view with these detestable characters.
I'd like to think that what my style of writing is, is an attempt not so much to judge the characters that I'm writing about, to expose them, to label them, to stereotype them, but instead to make them come alive for the reader with all their strengths and their flaws intact.
We are flawed creatures, all of us. Some of us think that means we should fix our flaws. But get rid of my flaws and there would be no one left.
I wrote a song on the record called 'Flawed Design' and it's basically looking at that, and it was just exploring how everybody obviously has flaws. I think to embrace those flaws - enjoy them, embrace them - and actually be a real person is something that a lot of people struggle with, myself included.
Nobody's perfect, everybody is flawed in a way, and to recognize your own flaws and to just enjoy them is something that I try to do for myself. I do that all the time.
I try to write about real women, real people - in other words flawed characters. I find flawed characters much more interesting than perfect ones and enjoy the challenge of making readers root for them in spite of their unsympathetic path and destructive choices. Life is about the gray areas. Things are seldom black and white, even when we wish they were and think they should be, and I like exploring this nuanced terrain.
I'm an actor, and I want to play flawed characters, and I'm a writer that wants to write flawed characters, trying to let something out and hoping people relate through that or have fun experiencing the story.
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.
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