Melissa Rosenberg Quotes

Each play I write has its own unique origin story.

I'm very interested in writing an actual series, that doesn't have too much to do with my music - a world I create that has characters in it. I'm just trying to get there by doing things that I want to do.

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.

Personally, I've made myself a very small window of what I enjoy in this business, which is I love being a big part of the storytelling process.

The first time that I saw people actually make the thing that I wrote was my first episode of 'Six Feet Under.' It was called 'Back To The Garden.'

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.

You start as an audience member and create a world you're interested in, and then you move into the telling of those stories, bringing what has interested you as an audience member.

I think what helps me when I'm working on a play, any play, is the degree to which the writer has truly visualized, and then fulfilled, the vision of the world that he or she is creating.

It wasn't until I was working on 'Tacky' that I admitted to myself that I was writing a series.

I have been writing songs and poems since I was a little girl. I started writing short scripts, which evolved into the idea for a book.

The TV schedule is essentially four or five days to get in touch with the story you're doing that week.

I love writing picture books and story books because of the exciting, visual life that artists and illustrators give to them. And most of all, I love writing novels because of the inner, emotional journeys that they take me on. Hopefully, the reader comes with me!

The other thing that I started doing for myself was, I went through my diary of ideas that I keep and made sure that the translation of the comic to the movie was good.

We have that illusion that we are 'deciding' what to make a character do, in order to 'convey our message' or something like that. But, at least in my experience, you are often more like a river-rafting guide who's been paid a bonus to purposely steer your clients into the roughest possible water.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

Sometimes they keep us in the dark, but it's TV, so sometimes they keep us in the dark because even they don't know yet. You know what I mean? So, it sort of develops as it goes along and according to various needs that arise.

When you do fiction, it is your imagination you have put out there.

I leave the story room to grow into what the movie is driving me to do.

Whenever I start a book, I swear it's going to be a short one. But then it's, 'Who was his grandfather? And how did he get there in the first place? And what kind of animals is he chasing?'

You hear many things, take a little from each experience, and tune your imagination to create believable characters and situations.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

I keep writing stories that I might want to bring to life one day.

This is absolutely the true answer, no word of a lie, 100% guaranteed: Q: What's the best way to turn my idea into a story? A: Whatever works for you.