Marti Noxon Quotes

Every day, I learn something new. I think one of the most exciting things for a writer is to work on a TV show. It's like a novel. You have a really long time to develop and learn about the characters, and you can just really keep digging in deeper, every week.

I read a lot of bad scripts and weird television shows. I don't know. There's a lot of work out there I was reading at 14 years old and noticing this lack of thought. And then, reading 'Afterschool,' that's full of thought. It was bursting with ideas.

My education - my Ph.D. in storytelling - comes from having worked on it, being a lover of film and watching them, from working with some great writers and some very good TV directors and then working with some who weren't.

If I write a cop show, it's not up to me to decide how different it is from 'Law & Order.' I had screenwriters go on and on and on about how their cop show isn't like any other cop show on TV. They made very good points, and it absolutely doesn't matter. It's entirely up to the audience to decide.

Because I was a television writer for many years, I write very conversationally. I put things straight, and with a lot of humor.

Sometimes I find it tiresome to write actions and describe the scene in a very intricate way so that every crew member understands where we are going - that I can find a little bit long and tiresome. But dialogue is just all my life. There's no way I could ever be challenged, not challenged, but I'm always so happy to write dialogue.

You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.

At the end of the day, it's really, really difficult to make a brand-new show, to write a pilot where you have to introduce characters and everyone has to kind of be dynamic and have something different for themselves.

My instinct is to absolutely recoil when talking about writing in a mechanistic way. Nothing could be dumber than writing a film or TV script based on prescriptions, on other peoples' ideas of what character should be.

Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

Humanizing good people is kind of boring and I don't really see the value in it... humanizing tricky characters is exhilarating, and making audience films out of indie subjects excites me.

I'll tell you what I miss most. What I would love to do, more than anything, is just anthologies. With an anthology you can tell any story and be in every division of television. We don't have any anthologies anymore, do we?

There's got to be something you want to tell and that's the engine which spurs all of the work you have to do in order to create the story, but you have to love some sort of nugget of what you're telling to be a filmmaker.

The director in TV and the writer and the creator are working very much hand in hand.

I enjoy the writing process and producing; I enjoy seeing an idea come to fruition. I'm driven by very complex characters. You look at the pilot of 'Breaking Bad,' where there's so much depth to the character, you can't help but be invested when you watch.

We don't feel pressure of, 'Let's make this really raunchy.' It's more about making a good story, which is 10 times harder. The raunchy stuff's really easy for us.

If someone said, 'Sit down and write a 'Community' episode,' I would be panicked.

In the writers' room, when we talk about each episode, we first talk about the character journey of the episode.

A novel, of course, is a fully self-contained work of art. You pick it up off the shelf, open it, and there it is - a whole universe waiting for you to enter. A screenplay is just a blueprint for making a movie. Until the movie is actually filmed, the script really means nothing.

I'm trying my hand at writing. I'm writing a couple of projects for HBO, a half hour comedy and a miniseries.

I'm sort lucky in that for me, I'm a writer now. I started as an actor but I'm a writer and so things like 'Wilfred' and shows like that are where I escape to.

I have been sent three or four scripts for television series, but there wasn't anything I really wanted to do. I want to tell a good story, whether it's a TV show, a movie, whatever. That's really my No. 1 criteria.

I love doing television; it's such a brilliant way to tell a story over six hours rather over the two hours of doing a movie.

The whole thing of doing a TV series, I find it very daunting not knowing where the story's going.

I liked to think I had written 'scripts' when I was in high school, but looking back at them, they were about thirty pages of wannabe-Mamet dialogue with a staple through them.