Meanwhile, the idea for Lars and the Real Girl had been simmering in her brain for several years. The storyline, about a shy, reclusive young man who buys a life-size doll over the Internet to be his girlfriend, and the subsequent reactions of his family and neighbors in his small town, had no one inspiration, Oliver says.

“A script is born of so many things,” she explains. “You could say that in the course of one of my many weird jobs, I came across the Real Doll Web site and that just sort of haunted me.” She finally wrote the script in a nine-month period back in 2002, but nothing happened with it until after her job at Six Feet Under began, when her agent asked if she had any scripts to shop around.

By 2005, Lars and the Real Girl was ranked No. 3 on the 2005 edition of The Black List, a compilation of the Top 90 most-liked—but unproduced—scripts in Hollywood. And negotiations began on selling the script, eventually to be directed by Craig Gillespie.

Unlike most screenwriters, who are usually shunted to the sidelines once filming begins, Oliver had the rare opportunity to see her dream child come to life, shooting with Ryan Gosling, Emily Mortimer and Patricia Clarkson in and around Toronto, Canada. “I thought, if I’m going to write for the movies, I need to see how they’re made,” she says. “And I promised to keep my mouth shut” during the intense 32-day shoot.

The results outpaced her imagining. “It was a crapshoot going in, but the film ended up being beautifully cast,” she says. “And I was so glad it ended up playing in the multiplexes, not just art houses. That mattered to me.” The night of the film’s screening at the Toronto Film Festival, she says “was really something,” as she watched her story unfold sitting next to old buddy Ball.

At the time of this interview, Oliver was enjoying some time off to rest and recharge (thanks to the then-unsettled writers’ strike) and was still a little dazed by the media attention she’d been receiving. After her Oscar nomination was announced, she had to give 17 interviews in three hours. She says that made her appreciate what it takes for stars to keep their cool on the red carpet amid popping flashbulbs.

As a writer, “You train yourself to be invisible, and then suddenly you’re supposed to talk,” she says. “One of the reasons you’re a writer is so you don’t have to talk.”

But she does have future writing projects lined up, including working (with Ball) on True Blood, a supernatural vampire drama for HBO, and on a movie for Warner Brothers. She’s also reading a lot, with an eye for adapting something for the screen. And she’s finally enjoying life in L.A. with her little Yorkie, Mabel, after a struggle to adjust and succeed.

“I have a good life now, but it took a long time,” she says. “I’m always going to be a Florida person.”