Maria Semple
Maria Semple
Maria Keogh Semple is an American novelist and screenwriter. She is the author of This One Is Mineand Where'd You Go, Bernadette. Her television credits include Beverly Hills, 90210, Mad About You, Saturday Night Live, Arrested Development, Suddenly Susan and Ellen...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth17 June 1964
CountryUnited States of America
mean thinking people
You come out into the world after a season of TV and you're just swearing and saying mean things to people and they're looking at you like, Who are you? And oh yeah, you think, I have to reacclimate to the way people genuinely treat each other.
great huge people room running school slide telling
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.
certain change characters complexity necessary novels
Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.
authors connected formal hear letter puts send taught thank themselves
I always write authors after I read their books. I've been doing it for years. I write a formal letter and send it to them in care of their agent. My mother always taught us to write thank you notes, and if an author puts themselves out there, they like to hear that their book connected with someone.
abandon written
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.
form itself love novels presented wildly
I love epistolary novels and became wildly excited when the form presented itself to me.
gets steer
I steer clear of any novel that gets billed as a 'meditation.'
room sideways spent time
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.
given needs novel represent specific time
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.
call concept escaping fluffy foreign means rides understood
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.
became fifteen terms wrote
When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.
bunk reading room survived tolstoy youth
I survived many a youth hostel bunk room reading Tolstoy by flashlight.
finding people
My talent isn't so much in traditional research as in finding really smart people and badgering them with questions.
books deeply delightful expect good move novel reach roar
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.