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.
— Maria Semple
'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' was surprisingly easy and fun to write because I was feeling such strong emotions.
I survived many a youth hostel bunk room reading Tolstoy by flashlight.
This is Seattle. We're supposed to have superior taste.
On Jan. 1, 2012, I resolved to not buy anything from Amazon for a year.
Creating art is painful. It takes time, practice, and the courage to stand alone.
I attended TED in 2007 and 2008, the last two years the conference was held in Monterey.
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.
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.
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.
I love epistolary novels and became wildly excited when the form presented itself to me.
Even when I was writing 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' I started to appreciate Seattle's many charms.
I think that everyone in Seattle, their daily existence, is enriched by all the charitable giving that is courtesy of Microsoft.
My favorite kind of book is a domestic drama that's grounded in reality yet slightly unhinged.
In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
We need to preserve our neighborhoods, our small business, our local economy.
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 you're an artist and you're on Twitter, you are doomed to mediocrity.
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!'
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.
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'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.
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.
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.
My talent isn't so much in traditional research as in finding really smart people and badgering them with questions.
When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.
'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.
My summer reading suggestion: Pick a really famous, really long novel.
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.
I guess that's what art is: Turning something painful into something people can relate to.
When I came back from my first TED, very few people knew what it was. But around the time I was sitting down to write 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' in 2010, TED was exploding.
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.
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.
Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.
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.
I just feel like there's this illicit thrill in reading other people's mail and spying on their lives.
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.
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 steer clear of any novel that gets billed as a 'meditation.'
I don't mind finding these ugly sides to my personality and exaggerating them because that's something you can write towards.
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.
