Jessica St. Clair Quotes

I think audiences can feel when they're being served a filler episode.

Storytelling takes many forms, and even feature-length storytelling is often 90 minutes or two hours. There's nothing stopping us from trying to do that on a week-to-week basis.

When you're telling taut, tight storytelling that has any kind of built-in plot twist elements, you tend to want to stack everything up on top of itself as opposed to letting things breathe and be languid in terms of the passage of time.

If you go wrong in a novel, you can straighten it out in the next chapter. You don't have any room to do that in a novella.

I really like scripted dramas. My favorite show of all time would have to be 'Lost': I loved how the writers and producers were able to weave the different storylines together; and the acting in that show was incredible.

It's easy to write a short story and frighten people for five pages, but to work at length, when you do it as in 'The Turn Of The Screw' or 'A Christmas Carol,' it's different; you have to build it and build it.

I've enjoyed working on the TV series that I've worked on, in particular something like 'The Wire,' where there was so much time to tell the story and develop a character. I learned from that that it's best not to lay all your cards on the table straight away.

A good story is elegantly wrapped, and the child discovers things bit by bit.

I'm just interested in serialization in fiction. I'm fascinated by it. I love the 19th-century novels. I'm interested in ways to bring that back to fiction.

Marc Cherry is so good at writing himself into a corner, then writing himself out of that corner. It's really fun to watch that.

You know, a TV show is a slow build.

I don't really look for a script and go, 'I need to do a thriller, so I'm going to do this.' I just read scripts and look for the best possible story.

Certainly it's very difficult to keep momentum going through a film which has as many characters as this does, and the piece took on a life of its own to try and shape it. That took all the time we had in editing.

To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared - she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That's the theory, anyway.

The success of the storytellers - we're only as good as what we can withhold from the audience. Aspects of surprise and letting things play out for the audience - it's so much a part of their enjoyment. It's one of the great things about working in the movies and being a great storyteller.

You write a novel by inventing a world and inventing the rules that govern that world. Then you break the rules when you want to.

If you're writing a novel, you can afford to see where the spirit takes you, but in terms of structure and engineering with a screenplay, you have to be quite pragmatic; otherwise, it will run away from you.

I try to tell a story the way someone would tell you a story in a bar, with the same kind of timing and pacing.

The 'Lost' style book is really quite set. We do things like, we walk through the jungle, and we stop and turn and talk to each other. We never talk and walk. We always stop to talk.

American shows can go on for 20 years. I respond more to the British format. Three seasons is a long run for them to tell a story.

What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away.

My books, I will say one thing - they all have a driving narrative, and you have to turn the pages, and the way you do that is to create characters that you really love and care about and put them in a fairly dire situation.

In fiction, you learn about pacing and how to build tension - which is something you want in a really good nonfiction feature article as well.

There's a real art to telling a story in two hours, and that will always be something that people are very, very interested in.

I find that most novels are not good all the way through. A story can be good all the way through, every sentence.