"We all have these tendencies in us that could go this way or that. I think that's the real key in writing. To look at a character without judgment"
About this Quote
Haggis is arguing for empathy with teeth: the idea that good writing doesn’t start by sorting people into heroes and villains, but by admitting how close those categories sit inside the same person. “These tendencies” is deliberately slippery language. It dodges psychology-speak and lands on something more unsettling: most of what we call character is potential, not essence. A person “could go this way or that” depending on pressure, opportunity, humiliation, love. That’s not a comforting humanist shrug; it’s a warning about how easily we moralize outcomes instead of tracing causes.
The line about “the real key” is also a quiet manifesto against the most common bad habit in screenwriting: using characters as mouthpieces for a thesis. Haggis came up in an era where prestige film and TV rewarded “stakes” and “arcs,” but his best-known work (Crash, for better and worse) is built on collisions between private motives and public identities. That context matters: when you write about race, class, violence, or politics, judgment is the default setting. It’s what audiences bring, what studios fear, what awards discourse feeds. “Without judgment” isn’t a plea to excuse harm; it’s a craft strategy to avoid flattening people into symbols.
Subtext: the writer has to hold two thoughts at once. You can depict ugly behavior and still refuse the cheap satisfaction of certainty. The payoff is dramatic, not moral. When you stop sentencing your characters, they start surprising you - and the audience has to do the uncomfortable work of recognizing themselves in the parts they’d rather condemn.
The line about “the real key” is also a quiet manifesto against the most common bad habit in screenwriting: using characters as mouthpieces for a thesis. Haggis came up in an era where prestige film and TV rewarded “stakes” and “arcs,” but his best-known work (Crash, for better and worse) is built on collisions between private motives and public identities. That context matters: when you write about race, class, violence, or politics, judgment is the default setting. It’s what audiences bring, what studios fear, what awards discourse feeds. “Without judgment” isn’t a plea to excuse harm; it’s a craft strategy to avoid flattening people into symbols.
Subtext: the writer has to hold two thoughts at once. You can depict ugly behavior and still refuse the cheap satisfaction of certainty. The payoff is dramatic, not moral. When you stop sentencing your characters, they start surprising you - and the audience has to do the uncomfortable work of recognizing themselves in the parts they’d rather condemn.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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