Quotes About Development

Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan and the slew of fantastic writers and directors have always geared me towards making a three-dimensional human.

I think writers should create characters who are human and have a character arc of their own.

When writers don't know what to do with a character, they build up the supporting cast and universe to kind of hide that fact. After a while, you can no longer see the character for the underbrush. When that happens, you need to bring out the weed-whacker to clear some of that away so you can focus on the main character.

You wanna do a lot of backstory for your character - as an actor, you wanna research that. But on the show, it's fun to remain in that naive place as you go along, and be able to continue to discover things about your character as the writers come up with them.

All I am doing every day is soaking in everything - I'm like a sponge, from all these award-winning directors, writers, and actors - as much as I can.

I get so used to working with writers that my prime occupation is development.

I've had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I've seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way.

And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.

Working with a guy like Ice Cube on 'Ride Along,' you learn so much. He's a guy who produces, writes, and directs, so you watch and learn and ask questions. As you go, you learn and figure out what you should and shouldn't do. I do nothing but soak up information.

When you're little, every experience writes on the canvas of who you are.

You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.

When I first got into technology I didn't really understand what open source was. Once I started writing software, I realized how important this would be.

Sometime early in life, I developed the notion - one which I have never relinquished - that writing a novel is the very finest thing a person can do.

It would be so simple to allow children, when tired of sitting, to rise, and when tired of writing, to desist, and then their bones would not be twisted.

I can tell you that the book 'The Ugly Truth' is about puberty and all the awfulness that comes with that time in a person's life. It was definitely some different subject matter to be writing about, especially knowing some of my audience are second and third graders.

Characters are incredibly important, but I tend to build them around the plot during the outline stage. However, once I'm writing the manuscript, the characters I'm writing dictate how the plot unfolds.

She assumes that skill will guide her fingertips, that shapely lines will uncoil out of the pencil the moment she starts. Surely talent is a thing curled deep inside, just waiting to be exercised, and at the slightest invitation it will stretch, shake itself, make itself known? Talent, it seems, is not so insistent.

History is a long time in the making.

Growth and change were viewed as reactions to conditions met

Some people are born without much yeast in their dough.

History has its own evolutionary strategy, toward consequentialities we cannot anticipate.

history takes a long time to happen.

A notion of character, not so much discredited as simply forgotten, once held that people only came into themselves partway through their lives.