Maria Semple Quotes
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I think that everyone in Seattle, their daily existence, is enriched by all the charitable giving that is courtesy of Microsoft.
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The one constant in my life has been my love of books: reading them, thinking about them, talking about them, holding them, turning people on to new ones.
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My father was a screenwriter, and I kind of grew up in that world. I always had a mind for characters and dialogue, and my head was filled with that stuff, so it seemed like a good place to start.
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In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics.
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It was important for me early on to find the voice of each character and figure out what was unique about them and their individual worldview that I could use for comedy or conflict.
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I guess that's what art is: Turning something painful into something people can relate to.
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When you become a parent, that's a whole new level of life intruding. Nobody tells you how boring and time-sucking it's going to be! Or how the responsibility feels like an airbag going off in your life.
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I try to begin with a strong grasp of my characters. Even if it's schematic, I need it clear in my head who these people are.
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I survived many a youth hostel bunk room reading Tolstoy by flashlight.
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I naively thought I would quit television writing, move up to Seattle, my novel would come out, and then I'd have a novel writing career, and so I found myself really stuck in this very poisonous self-pitying state and felt like I'd never write again. And I blamed Seattle for that.
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My strength as a TV writer was my total lack of interest in television.
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Writing a novel is so hard, and there are so many problems that the last thing you're thinking about is adapting this mess you have on your hands as a movie. You just want to get it to work as a novel. That's your main focus.
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'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' was surprisingly easy and fun to write because I was feeling such strong emotions.
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And dialogue, I'm good at it, and it's because it's the only thing you have to work with in TV writing.
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I keep an elaborate calendar for my characters detailing on which dates everything happens. I'm constantly revising this as I go along. It gives me the freedom to intricately plot my story, knowing it will at least hold up on a timeline.
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I never understood the concept of a fluffy summer read. For me, summer reading means beaches, long train rides and layovers in foreign airports. All of which call for escaping into really long books.
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I must say, it was a lot easier writing novels than I thought it would be. I think it's because I'm a novelist at heart, and it took me a while to figure that out.
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Some people, especially literary people, they think, 'I'll write this original script, and it will be full of ideas. I'll submit it, and they'll hire me for television.' That's not the case.
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I don't mind finding these ugly sides to my personality and exaggerating them because that's something you can write towards.
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In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.
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One reason I find all this character growth and narrative swerving so exhilarating is because I never got to do it when I wrote for TV. Our characters needed to remain consistent from week to week.
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Much of the time in the writer's room is spent working on story, and I was always challenging myself to make it more interesting, tighter and more surprising: to come at it sideways in a way that the audience wasn't expecting.
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There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.
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I know what it's like to feel snobby; I know what it's like to feel anxiety; I know what it's like to feel like busted because you're crazy.