Nancy Dubuc Quotes

You know, a TV show is a slow build.

Good scripts and interesting stories are hard enough to find.

You can't visit readers where you think they are. You have to invite them home to where you are and try to lure them into your universe. That's the art of storytelling.

I write the kind of stuff I'd like to watch.

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.

I love all genres. The only thing I get stymied by is the Family Drama. I don't necessarily know how to approach that.

That's one of those things that will really hurt me personally, if I label a character or think about what it might do if it were to do well. I just try to do a good job with it.

If you don't spend the time you need on developing characters and finding stories, complicated stories, the audience gets tired because they think they're seeing the same thing again and again.

Since I've had some success, story and character are always the two elements I think about first in material presented to me. Some of my choices have been more successful than others.

I think sometimes when you have 24 episodes, you almost have to stretch things out too much.

I'm good at description and imparting flow to a story, but I don't necessarily understand the value of long scenes.

As an author, you think you know where the good parts and the bad parts are. And then you read to a group of children, and you learn when you're boring them, and you hurry through those sections to get to the parts where they're interested again. You start to get a sense of your story's rhythm and flow.

I just read the script; everything else just follows. Content is the most important thing for me.

I think a script is great when it starts with the structure and works with the structure without falling into the typical three-act system in which the audience is ahead of the movie. I hate that, but that is like 99% of what I read.

I think our goal and intention is to make sure that, when you watch each episode, you don't have to make that choice, but also that you can have stand-alone episodes, where a story can have a beginning, middle and end.

I started as a playwright. Any sort of scriptwriting you do helps you hone your story. You have the same demands of creating a plot, developing relatable characters and keeping your audience invested in your story. My books are basically structured like three-act plays.

There was a time when I read a script and I just got excited about the possibilities.

I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.

I usually don't find myself reacting to my characters. I just create them ... And let the audience decide whether they're empathetic or scared or compelled to cheer me on.

That's why I love doing television because it's something that fans and viewers can sit down each week and get to know your character and get to know the show and get to know what's going on and fall in love with you all over again, like they did in previous shows.

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.

There is commerciality in storytelling, even in a film or a piece of literature. These things exist. That's why stories came to be: to hold attention and, while you're not looking, you'll get hopefully some nutritional value that the author has been working up. That's narrative; that's passing stuff down.

The marketplace tells us that good, visceral storytelling has a place. But there are lots of questions about the format that stories take.

There are so many projects that you go into hoping the story works, and here comes a new third act and that kind of thing.

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?