In junior high, when we got our first VCR, I used to tape four soaps a day. I was a diehard 'General Hospital' fan from when I was nine to 25.
— Julie Plec
I didn't get paid to write professionally until my first episode of 'Kyle XY,' which was the fourth episode of the first season.
I don't like villains who are just villains. People who are just there to be bad - ugh - so annoying.
God bless Hollywood and all that it stands for, but, you know, people tend to peak in their 40s, and then it's all downhill from there.
I feel like Caroline Forbes is such a crucial element... on 'The Vampire Diaries.'
Don't do another show just because someone thinks that there's a dollar to be earned there. Do it because you love the characters, and you love the world, and you really, truly feel both the fans and you as a storyteller can benefit from having the second show.
In a non-supernatural universe, there's just character, and it's humanity and human beings and how they relate to each other.
When you're the showrunner, you're the person that's in control of most of the details, and to be able to take all that and then to step right behind the camera and to have a direct line of communication with the crew and with the actors - to not be delivering that through another person - is pretty freeing and extremely stimulating.
The funny thing about the entertainment business is that we all feel like kids playing in a candy store, but we are entrusted with millions and millions and millions of dollars and an entire industry that can thrive or die on whether or not we do our jobs well or not.
I'm a night owl; I could work until 6 in the morning without even thinking about it.
I remember just weeping my way through the 'Friday Night Lights' finale with my best friend and just being so happy all the way through because it was so beautiful.
I would never say no to continuing to explore the - somebody coined the phrase for me the other day, which I love - 'TVDU,' 'The 'Vampire Diaries' Universe.' I have no desire to exploit it, but I also know that there are plenty of opportunities for stories left to be told.
Growing up, I remember watching 'Little House on the Prairie' and 'L.A. Law' and being so obsessed with it.
Speaking only for myself, the ideal finale to me is 'Friday Night Lights,' where you have loved and worshipped a show for all these years, you get to come back, celebrate the characters, finish up their journeys, and send everyone out with a feeling of, 'My God, I'm so grateful that I got to know these people.'
When you have to spread heroism across too many players, you don't get to really dig deep into each of them as much as you'd want to.
I don't pray. I'm not a deeply religious person.
Write something good that the people like.
There's a reason a happy ending is called an ending. The trick of a television storyteller is to find all the rivers and mountains and valleys on the way to that ending.
Actors have their own processes, and if you want to be respectful of their process, you've got to communicate with them in the language of their process, and keeping that all straight is a little bit of a head-scratcher.
You're supposed to be writing from experience - experience with people, with reading, seeing some homeless guy on the street and making up some story of him in your head. If you never see any of that or have those conversations or even sleep enough to have vivid dreams, then what are you writing about?
I've always loved the genre of virus movies or Armageddon movies - anything that involves being trapped with the cute boy in detention when the zombies are attacking.
Happiness is not necessarily a drama magnet.
'Originals' is a show that is not about struggling as a vampire but reveling in it. It's about embracing vampirism.
There's something about a supernatural universe that you would think would actually make it easier to create tension and build conflict and have big scares and big ideas and big sequences. And that's true in a lot of ways. You can pick the best idea out of a hat.
What's funny is, I was always certain that I couldn't be a director because there are things about the physics of camera and lighting that I fundamentally cannot wrap my head around.
The people I worked for before I was doing 'Vampire Diaries' were very generous to me.
The one thing that always drove me crazy, especially on soaps, was when someone would have something they were hiding, and then six months later, they were still holding onto that secret, and the world has come to a complete, total end as a result of it. If they'd only just confessed!
It was a high-class problem burden, but it was still a burden on 'The Vampire Diaries,' in which we had this group of characters that we loved writing for so much and who had so much available story to tell.
It took me some time to realize television, for someone like me, was the perfect medium. I like to produce, I like to be detail-orientated, I like to be in charge of a lot of things, and I like to be a storyteller. It's kind of the perfect gig for someone like me.
I used to sneak 'General Hospital' when I was a kid. My cousin was my babysitter, and she watched it, so I got hooked on it. I wasn't supposed to be watching it, but I was so obsessed with it that I'd find ways, even as an 8-year-old, to get into that.
Fans are always talking about endgame as though endgame has been chosen from minute 1. I don't know that you could talk to a single series creator that would say confidently 'Where I started is where I finished, and there was no way in hell I was going to stray from that path.' 'Dawson's' being the perfect example.
If you write a good line, you write a good line, and the best line wins in television. It doesn't matter if you're the guy who gets the coffee or if you're the showrunner - best line wins. That's the beauty of television collaboration.
There are a lot of things you do in a supernatural universe that can toe the line and cross the line.
I think the model of The CW Network is really built on the fan platform more than anything else. The success or longevity of a series has less to do with the number it's pulling and more to do with the social footprint... There is a lot about the fan support on a strictly business level that's really powerful for that network.
I do all these panels where people are always talking about the lack of female directors, and I have a lot of opinions on that.
I had a moment where I wrote a movie script, and it was my first movie job, and I was very excited to do it, and my only goal was really not to get fired off of it.
The supernatural world, the sci-fi world - they give you scenarios that can truly be life or death.
I grew up as an avid reader. I would go to the library and check out 40 books a week. Some of them were smarty books; most of them were 'Sweet Valley High' and young teen romance.
TV is really, really, really hard work. You sacrifice a lot of your personal life, a lot of your sanity, just to do one show.
Humanity has both its beautiful and its ugly sides.
We all have our own party fantasy that we've either lived or wanted to live in New Orleans.
There's something about two people coming together in the rain that is the ultimate expression of love in the minds of most audiences, I guess.
The joke of being a showrunner is that people ask how you get it all done, and you don't. The list of things I don't get done in a given day is longer than the list of things I do. And one of the things that's first to go is watching dailies.
I watched a lot of soap operas, when I was growing up, and a lot of those great serialized soap dramas.
I remember, my freshman year of college, sitting in my TV room at the end of my dorm hallway with one other girl watching the premiere of 'Beverly Hills, 90210.' And then, a year later, walking into a room packed with college students watching '90210,' and I thought, 'I wonder what it must be like to be part of a phenomenon like that.'
I've always been a super-fan of television storytelling. It took me a while to figure that out in a career capacity, but certainly in a life capacity, I've been an avid viewer of television for decades.
Cynicism doesn't have its way in series finales. My emotional desire when I watch a series come to an end is to be crying and laughing and cheering as the final credits roll, feeling like I just got delivered the happy ending, whether the plot ends happily or not.
If people love 'TVD' in 20 years the way they still love 'Buffy' today - on its 20th anniversary - I will be happy.
I thought, 'Oh, I'll be an independent producer. Oh, I'll be a manager.' I was going through all those things in my head, and one night, late at night, I was having what I would now describe as probably a panic attack because there were so many unknowns. An almost literal voice came into my head telling me, 'You need to write.'
If the day-to-day culture is saying it's OK to not be inclusive or tolerant, that it's OK to be bigoted, then it's your responsibility to double down and make it OK in storytelling to be inclusive and tolerant.
