A Goodreads user
A Goodreads user asked Maggie Stiefvater:

Which is more exciting for you: world building, or character development; and why is it exciting to you?

Maggie Stiefvater As a writer, I think my greatest strength and my greatest weakness are the same: I am interested in character above all other things. Obviously a good book requires more than good character development — it needs a world for the characters to live in, and events to move the characters and vice versa — but I am very interested in the inner workings of their heads, sometimes to the exclusion of other things.

Why? I've always been interested in the intimate side of events. War doesn't interest me: soldiers do. Protests don't interest me: protestors do. Parades don't interest me: the performers do. I'm interested in big, complicated things only after looking at the tiny movable pieces and gluing them together. The Raven Cycle's a really good example of how I am interested in this big world — but only by looking at it through a multitude of individuals.

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