When I am preparing my 'lookalike' photographs, I think about the character of the real people, because, if the photographs are going to be plausible, you have to convince the viewer that they could have happened.
At the core, I try to write characters who are real people with real insecurities, fears, hopes, and dreams, which is why hopefully readers can identify with them.
It was easy to believe, between lessons on Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen, that all of the great stories had already been written by dead Europeans. But every time I saw 'The Outsiders', I knew better. It was the first time I'd realized that real people write books.
There are real people on the pitch. We're not commodities. Well, maybe we are to some degree, but it's the team which creates business. Some people don't appreciate that.
I like to write about real people, real crimes. But what has increasingly come to interest me, and also appear to me as a challenge, is the idea of doing strange things with what is real. Take what is real and make it more or less real.
We're all used to seeing pretty people. I want to see real people.
There are great news anchors; they're probably very smart, but they're not talking to the audience like real people. They're just reading from a teleprompter.
There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form.
I think, really, what I'm interested in is whole women, real people.
I always do a lot of work around characters to make them real people because, oftentimes, they really are a sliver of a person. Even with truly wonderful writers, women characters are there to emote, and they're often incredibly chaste or worthy. Or they're a 'different type of woman', which is the worst.
