Playing a character: discovering & revealing

"Playing a character is a fun and funny business. It has two parts, quite entangled: discovering your character, and then revealing her. She'll start out kind of abstract, a half-person made of modes of action (her forms) and impulses (her best interests). It's in action and in interaction that the two multiply into a personality, into a person with history and psychology and positions relative to the others and to the events that happen. Your game is to bring her out and bring her into focus."

-Vincent Baker, from "In a Wicked Age . . ."