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
characters filled good grew head mind seemed
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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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.
good tv work
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 quickly realized that shopping on Amazon had made the idea of parking my car and going into a store feel like an outrageous imposition on my time and good nature.
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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.
writing thinking good-things
I think one of the good things about writing novels is that you always start from scratch.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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.
feeling
'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' was surprisingly easy and fun to write because I was feeling such strong emotions.
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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.
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.