Maria Semple
An artist must create. If she doesn't, she will become a menace to society.Collection: Society
I think because I try to keep things as real as I can, or I try to start from a place of reality, I almost don't have the imagination to write a book that's not set where I am.Collection: Imagination
When I graduated high school, I was one of many English-majors-to-be traveling through Europe with a copy of 'Let's Go Europe' in one hand, 'Anna Karenina' in the other, a Eurail pass for a bookmark.
I survived many a youth hostel bunk room reading Tolstoy by flashlight.
'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' is an epistolary novel - one told in letters. I had no idea how much fun it would be, puzzling together the plot with letters and documents.
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.
'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' was surprisingly easy and fun to write because I was feeling such strong emotions.
When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.
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.
Both 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' and my first novel, 'This One is Mine,' are pretty complex on a story level, and fun reads as a result.
I love epistolary novels and became wildly excited when the form presented itself to me.
There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.
I think a novel has to be about where you are at a given moment in time. I think it really needs to represent some specific pain you're going through. it's not just a story.
Ruthless concern with story is what I learned in television.
And dialogue, I'm good at it, and it's because it's the only thing you have to work with in TV writing.
I drop my kid off at school and then race home, and it's a very limited time. I can only do really serious writing for a couple of hours. And then I always go on a walk, I do a one-to-two-hour walk; I don't go running or hard hiking.
On my walks, that's when the good ideas come. The kind of hard, gritty work is when you're sitting at the computer and it's kind of intense and you're kind of in super control of it - the walks are when you let go. That's when the really big breakthroughs come in, and it's very strange.
In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.
My father was a screenwriter, and I kind of grew up in that world.
'Mad About You' fit my sensibility the most of any show that I worked on, and as a result, it was really fun. It felt like a very natural fit.
I think that's the most important job of a novelist - to bring authority to their writing.
After decades spent in rewrite rooms surrounded by other shouting writers, I discovered that I work best alone. I like being in charge of my time, working out the problems according to my own rhythms and being able to nap. That's a big one, the napping on demand!
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.
There's a happiness that comes from writing that I won't live without.
My first novel didn't sell well. It was really painful and humiliating and shocking to me.
My strength as a TV writer was my total lack of interest in television.
In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.
I learned that comedy is born out of strong characters. I won't begin writing a character until I have a clear take on them.
My talent isn't so much in traditional research as in finding really smart people and badgering them with questions.
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.
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.
I don't know if it's a failure of imagination on my part, but I'm not going to be writing about Paris in the 1800s. I feel like it would come off as just ludicrously uninformed, even if I did a lot of research.
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.
I don't mind finding these ugly sides to my personality and exaggerating them because that's something you can write towards.
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.
In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics.
I steer clear of any novel that gets billed as a 'meditation.'
I'm consistently blown away by 'Mad Men.' Having spent so much time in the writers' room, I'm cursed in that anytime I watch something, I'm always calculating what the writers are up to.
My favorite kind of book is a domestic drama that's grounded in reality yet slightly unhinged.
If I had written something, and I had written myself into a corner, I didn't abandon it. Because I remembered: There's always more.
I can only do really serious writing for a couple of hours. And then I always go on a walk. I do a one-to-two-hour walk; I don't go running or hard hiking.
I think that everyone in Seattle, their daily existence, is enriched by all the charitable giving that is courtesy of Microsoft.
I suppose I could admire all these slow Seattle drivers for their safety-mindedness, consideration for others, and peace of mind. Instead, I'm a fury of annoyance.
Even when I was writing 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' I started to appreciate Seattle's many charms.
I just feel like there's this illicit thrill in reading other people's mail and spying on their lives.
After decades spent in rewrite rooms surrounded by other shouting writers, I discovered that I work best alone. I like being in charge of my time, working out the problems according to my own rhythms and being able to nap.
It's great to be able to just go with an idea and not have 10 people in a room telling me why I can't write in a huge mud slide at a school function with 50 kindergartners running around.
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.
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.
Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.