As an artist, Keenen Ivory Wayans offers a great deal of relevance to the personalities in his work. He thinks that producing solid, fully-realized personalities is vital to telling an engaging story or producing a successful comedy. He likely spends a lot of time establishing his personalities as well as ensuring that they are relatable, intriguing, and unique.
"So if you want to have a great video game-based movie you have to keep the mood of the game, use the normal character setup - but you have to flesh out the story and provide more background for the characters"
"The way I write is that I'll actually have a conversation out loud with myself. In a weird way, I just kind of get schizophrenic and play two characters"
"From beginning to end it's about keeping the energy and the intensity of the story and not doing too much and not doing too little, but just enough so people stay interested and stay involved in the characters"
"They weren't impatient for the boys to turn into cartoons again. They awarded sympathy, gave compassion. Because deep down they had found parts of themselves in the characters. You said it George"
"And I have to credit David Jacobs with the opportunities he gave me. He was totally into sharing the creation of characters. David put together a show that told the story of people over many years' time and that was greatly enjoyable. Though nowadays that is frowned upon"
"I plot the first 5 or 6 chapters quite minutely, and also the end. So I know where I am going but not how I'm going to get there, which gives characters the chance to develop organically, as happens in real life as you get to know a person"
"I think for anybody reading the book they're going to get an idea in their heads of all those characters, and I think that once that gets fixed, it's quite hard to shake"
