A Quote by Mark Billingham
The day a character becomes predictable is the day a writer should think about moving on - because the reader certainly will.
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I tend to think that the onus is on the writer to engage the reader, that the reader should not be expected to need the writer, that the writer has to prove it. All that stuff might add up to a kind of fun in the work. I like things that are about interesting subjects, which sounds self-evident.
Comic-strip artists generally have very modest ambitions. Day to day, we labor to fit together all these little moving parts - a character or two, a few lines of dialogue, framing, pacing, payoff - but we certainly don't think of them adding up over time to some larger portrait of our times.
When you're making your living as a writer or an artist or a musician, you kind of live in a trance. You're sort of in the day-to-day world, you're certainly there for your day-to-day relationships with people, and so on.
As a reader, when the writer gets sentimental, you drift, because there's something fishy going on there. You recognize a moment that's largely about the writer and the writer's own need to believe in something that might not in fact exist. As a reader, you think, 'Where did the story go? Where did the person I'm reading about go?'
Where does a character come from? Because a character, at the end of the day, a character will be the combination of the writing of the character, the voicing of the character, the personality of the character, and what the character looks like.
I'd never thought much about a series, because I liked the idea of picking a script I liked with a character I thought I could sustain for an hour. In a series, you live with one character day in and day out - and you only hope it will be one that will not drive you crazy.
In that way, any world you create will become real. The reader makes it so. The reader becomes implicated in the creation of the world, complicit with the writer. It's the best sort of bond with audience that a writer can hope for, but it demands a great deal of trust on both sides.
If a retainer will just think about what he is to do for the day at hand, he will be able to do anything. If it is a single day's work, one should be able to put up with it. Tomorrow, too is but a single day.
I should love to do a novel, about one abnormal character seeing present-day life, very ordinary life, yet arresting through it, abnormality, until at the end the reader sees, and with little reluctance, that he is not abnormal at all, and that the main character might as well be himself.
I'm a writer because I love reading. I love the conversation between a reader and a writer, and that it all takes place in a book-sort of a neutral ground. A writer puts down the words, and a reader interprets the words, and every reader will read a book differently. I love that.
If we don't hope, if we don't stay positive - at least about love, or finding love - then the rest of life becomes really just painful to think about, because for the most part, you know, day-to-day stuff is monotonous.
Show the reader what the character thinks about, and then the reader will think about it too.
Galentine's Day is the day before Valentine's Day. People sometimes think, 'Oh, it's a replacement for Valentine's Day.' But it's not. You can celebrate Galentine's and Valentine's. And it comes from the sitcom 'Parks And Recreation'... Amy Poehler's character created this holiday because she wanted a day to celebrate her girlfriends.
There are so many ways to approach a character. You have to figure out the similarities between you and the character, build on them, and at the same time, blur the dissimilarities. Since you do it day in and day out, it becomes a process and a part of you.
...treasure what it means to do a day's work. It's our one and only chance to do something productive today, and it's certainly not available to someone merely because he is the high bidder. A day's work is your chance to do art, to create a gift, to do something that matters. As your work gets better and your art becomes more important, competition for your gifts will increase and you'll discover that you can be choosier about whom you give them to.
I hate Valentine's Day. I think every day should be a day of romance. Then, on Valentine's Day, you should get to tell whoever you hate that you cannot stand them. There would be one day of hating, and 364 days of love.
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