6 Insightful Quotes by Authors on Writing Characters

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”

- Ernest Hemingway

---

"The job boils down to two things: paying attention to how the real people around you behave and then telling the truth about what you see.

It’s also important to remember that no one is ‘the bad guy’ or ‘the best friend’ or ‘the whore with a heart of gold’ in real life; in real life we, each of us, regard ourselves as the main character, the protagonist, the big cheese; the camera is on us, baby.

If you can bring this attitude into your fiction, you may not find it easier to create brilliant characters, but it will be harder for you to create the sort of one-dimensional dopes that populate so much pop fiction."

- Stephen King

---

"Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?"

- Cornelia Funke

---

"You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are."

- Joss Whedon

---

"If you treat characters like people, they'll reward you by being fully developed individuals."

- Don Roff

---

"When reading we don't fall in love with the character's APPEARANCE. We fall in love with their words, their thoughts, and their hearts. We fall in love with their SOULS."

- Anonymous