Zitat des Tages von Maria Semple:
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.
Ruthless concern with story is what I learned in television.
Even when I was writing 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' I started to appreciate Seattle's many charms.
We need to preserve our neighborhoods, our small business, our local economy.
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 guess that's what art is: Turning something painful into something people can relate to.
An artist must create. If she doesn't, she will become a menace to society.
I love epistolary novels and became wildly excited when the form presented itself to me.
I just feel like there's this illicit thrill in reading other people's mail and spying on their lives.
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.
When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.
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.
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.
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 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.
This is Seattle. We're supposed to have superior taste.
Creating art is painful. It takes time, practice, and the courage to stand alone.
When you need a good laugh, do you reach for a book? I don't. I expect books to move me deeply and submerge me in another reality. So when a novel makes me roar with laughter, it's always a delightful surprise.
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.
'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' was surprisingly easy and fun to write because I was feeling such strong emotions.
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.
My strength as a TV writer was my total lack of interest in television.
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.
'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.
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 don't mind finding these ugly sides to my personality and exaggerating them because that's something you can write towards.
I'm not the comedy police, but you watch a movie, and everyone's laughing, and then you shake it out, and you realize, 'There's no joke there!'
My first novel didn't sell well. It was really painful and humiliating and shocking to me.
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.
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.
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 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.
