Ann Nocenti Quotes

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.

The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.

I think what good television does well is that it shows characters evolving.

If you give a character room to breathe, they come alive.

I love series television because it's so much fun to have that much opportunity to paint the character.

I'm still really fascinated with characters and people and telling their stories.

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

What's fun about doing a series is you get to take some time to create the character.

I've always felt, even with sketches, that if you don't care about these people, then it doesn't matter.

Whenever you're blessed and given a second season, you can really let the characters evolve. That first season, you're setting everything up. It's background, where they're coming from, what they want to do. And then you get to marinate in it that second season.

It's always nice to do the flashbacks. That's what's so great about 'Scandal' is that we get to do flashbacks and then keep figuring out and discovering more things about our characters that make them fuller.

It's always incredible though when you feel like the writer knows the character intimately and can see their life sprawling away outside of the show.

In a series, you have the luxury of time to establish the character and build a rhythm. In a TV movie, you've got to come up with the rhythm now. Right now.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

I think books with weak or translucent plots can survive if the character being drawn along the path is rich, interesting and multi-faceted. The opposite is not true.

In a series, you really need to stay open-minded. It's not like a play or a film, where you can create and fully commit to your character's back-story.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

I like having a plot; I like characters with a reason to get up in the morning.

An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else.

I'd never really been in a series, where you see a man at different points and perspectives in his life. Usually it's a film, where I'm playing a character who just comes in and offers something up.

Whether you're writing a horror show or a James Bond film, I think what bubbles beneath is interesting characterization. The colors that emerge through storytelling is what a dramatist does. There's always got to be something bubbling underneath that will erupt at some point.

When you have a movie, you know who they start out as and where they go. But this is constantly changing, and you're growing with the character.

And I have the support of the writers: I have a great relationship with the creative team, and they have a good hold of my character and my personality, and they come up with some great stuff, and I'm forever trying to change it up, keep it fresh.