I just keep doing that with my books. my characters are getting older along with me. I guess I can remember reading books when I was younger about older women and thinking, isn't that interesting? They're still they still have a rich inner life. They're still people, still have relationships. And things still matter. They're not just sort of blobs.
People say that they don't like road trip books. And I thought about why that might be and I do get it and I think it's because you can't use minor characters in the same way that you can in other books and you also can't like place is hard cuz you're moving from place to place. So, every place has to make a big impression. Every character has to be very clear who they are in their your first interaction with them.
I was really interested in having our antagonist be somebody who is younger than Peter, who really represents, in many ways, what young people are going through right now, what young people are feeling. This is a character who can literally jump into other people's minds and experience the lives of other people. But she's also a person who is completely alone in this city, and nobody really knows the real her, you know.
I can't think of any other movie or TV show that has had a relationship like this one. It just is so nuanced and so deep and so, but also has been fraught with a lot of pain. I mean, that relationship was, it was mother-daughter, it was best friend, it was enemies for a while, it was respectful co-workers.
I think if we have a quest narrative, whether it's in a poem, a novel, or a movie, we need to have a protagonist with detailed, believable motivation. He needs to want something. So the fact that these desires seem to be stripped from Odysseus, he doesn't seem to want food, doesn't seem to want sex. What does he want?
The truth is that virtue is not different than any other skill. You don't have it or not have it. You do it or you don't do it. And you get better at it the more you do it. This is the fundamental insight of Aristotle, that excellence is not innate. It is a habit.
Details in fiction are everything. Even kids write and say, "I like your books because people brush their teeth." I mean, it's that kind of, you know, everyday stuff. And that gives us a bond with the characters.
I'm more interested in depicting a reality that I'm more familiar with, which is intergenerational debt, struggling, single parenthood, and it's more interesting to me to write stories with characters who subvert these expectations of what an immigrant and a woman should and can be in America.
You look for ways you can empathize with every character. And if you're playing a scoundrel of any stripe, you just try to make it interesting. You try to figure out what made him that way.
What we're doing is we're creating a hero's journey for somebody. And what we're surrounding him with are this cast of bizarre, eccentric weirdos and hopefully carving out a path for him to become the leader at the end and have his 12 Angry Men moment where he inspires us all and unites us and then we pull the curtain back and celebrate him as a human being.
I think actors look for characters that are layered and by that I mean may contradict themselves. They break the stereotype, let's put it that way, if they contradict themselves.
6mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
