Abbi Jacobson Quotes

Obviously, I love to do both contemporary and historical fiction. When a hint of a story grabs me, I try to go with it to see where it will take me whatever the setting.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

The few times I've tried to write original screenplays, it's a difficult process because I just don't feel like I know the characters the way I know them after the year or two it takes to write a novel.

I didn't necessarily have a total idea when I was writing the movie of where everything was going. I just wanted to have really realistic dialogue and write like people I knew talked. I tried to keep it very real.

I love working fictional characters into a piece of history. It plays to my strengths, which are characterization and dialogue, and assists me in my admitted weakness, plot.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

Writing a TV show is totally different than writing features, or just, what I started doing is writing features. You write a little bit more organically. You start from the beginning to the end, beginning, middle and end.

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.

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.

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.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

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.

Writing film scripts is the hardest thing in the world. A script has to go to five or six drafts, and you need the feedback of other people and to keep coming back with a fresh eye, honing it down.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

I think every character I've ever come up with has been based on someone or something I've known.

I write short stories when a little idea occurs to me, that I know isn't a part of a novel that will stand by itself and should be concentrated.

Writing sketches, you're also learning about a journey and characters, and you translate that to bigger things.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

I want to write a film. I need to think of the right idea and focus on that; I love writing.

I'm always so inspired by Jeff Eastin's writing.

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

I often draw from people in my own experience to base a character on, going back to my days with Mike Leigh.

I don't think in genres. Once I get a germ of an idea I wait for it to die! And if it refuses to die and keeps coming back, I start thinking more about it. Then come the world and the characters. I wait to get bored and if I don't get bored- then I start building on them.