When you are dealing with something that's crazy, you still want actors to play characters and find the reality of the situation, no matter how absurd the situation is.
There's no such thing as a perfect person, so it makes no sense to write a perfect person. I don't know any author who'd try. And we write characters, not representations of groups.
With any actor, if you know your character well enough, you'll know pretty much what he would say under any circumstance, or whatever situation might rear its head.
All through college, I was searching for characters that would make me unique and set me apart from the typical ventriloquist with the typical dummy that was the little boy, cheeky hard figure like Charlie McCarthy.
I've sort of closed my mind off to reality shows: I just don't watch them, don't care about them, don't know who the characters are, but they're all in general usage.
The don't-ask-don't-tell approach to plot and character that 'The Hurt Locker' relies on to set itself in motion doesn't offend me politically. It offends me as a storyteller.
What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.
And I'm so excited to remind people and even gain new fans who find out about Dharma - a new generation who could find out about Dharma and enjoy her and all the characters on the show.
We knew we'd never find someone called Rock Hard, which was our ideal name, and for a while we toyed with the idea of just creating the character but never letting him get seen.
My first two novels were set in the past, and that freed me up in a lot of ways; it allowed me to find my way into my story and my characters through research.
Chavez made a compete fool of himself in front of the entire world while giving the U.N. a black eye. But the real losers are the Venezuelan people who have to put up with this unstable character every day.
Besides, it doesn't make any sense to have these characters living in the year 3000 when all their points of reference are from the pop culture of the 80's and the 90's.
I guess you can say that every actor is a 'character actor' on some level. But I think some actors have a wider range. I think that's how you get that mantle.
If you're playing the character, you could say to yourself in 16 different ways, What if that didn't bother me? What if I knew exactly what he was talking about? What if I didn't get excited?
The theater of the mind is impossible to compete with, and I like the idea that with a few suggestions, each reader forms in his or her own mind what a character or a place looks like.
I like to put my characters through a lot, so, in 'Talon,' my fans will find familiar themes of bravery and sacrifice, and what it means to be human... even if you're not human.
In the early '90s, I wrote a play called 'Word of Mouth' in which I played a number of different characters. One was a thirteen-year-old boy who, through a series of diary entries, realizes that he's gay.
For me, one of the most important things I look for in an actor is whether we can converse. Do we have a similar ability to discuss a character?
In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.
Bob Harras' personal and creative integrity is respected and renowned throughout the comic book industry. As an editor, he provides invaluable insight into storytelling and character.
I just noticed recently that in one book after another I seem to find an excuse to find some character who, to put it idiotically simply, is allowed to talk crazy.
