Let me describe myself as a kid: highly intelligent, way too chubby, incredibly sensitive, nerdy and painfully shy.

I wore coke bottle thick glasses. Two corn row braids traveled down the sides of my skull in a way that was just not pretty on me. And here’s the kicker — I was often the only black girl in my class.

In my house, you got in trouble if you didn’t speak up. My mom would be furious at us if we went to school and behaved nicely if someone treated us badly. If we got in trouble because we had yelled at them or told them that they were wrong, my mother would be like, “Good job.”

She moved to San Francisco after graduation and landed in “very lowly” positions at McCann Erickson. The advertising firm had recently won the Barbie account and asked employees to reflect on their childhood experiences with the doll.

“I wrote about how, as a kid, I kept all my Barbie high heels inside the head of my Ken doll,” Rhimes recalls. “They filmed a test commercial based on that copy. It was cool to see my words said out loud. I thought, ‘I have a knack for this writing thing.’ ”

I did not dream of being a TV writer. Never, not once when I was here in the hallowed halls of the Ivy League, did I say to myself, “Self, I want to write TV.”

You know what I wanted to be? I wanted to be Nobel Prize Winning Author Toni Morrison. That was my dream.

I blue sky-ed it like crazy. I dreamed and dreamed. And while I was dreaming, I was living in my sister’s basement. Dreamers often end up living in the basements of relatives, fyi.

Anyway, there I was in that basement, I was dreaming of being Nobel Prize Winning Author Toni Morrison. Guess what? I couldn’t be Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison. Because Toni Morrison already had that job and she wasn’t interested in giving it up.

One day I was sitting in that basement and I read an article in the NY Times that said it was harder to get into USC Film School than it was to get into Harvard Law School.

I could dream about being Toni Morrison. Or I could do. At film school, I discovered an entirely new way of telling stories. A way that suited me. A way that brought me joy. A way that flipped this switch in my brain and changed the way I saw the world.

Rhimes excelled in film school to a degree that would make Christina Yang break out in hives. She earned the prestigious Gary Rosenberg Writing Fellowship and managed to catch the industry’s eye shortly after graduation while her peers scrambled for PA gigs.

One set of eyes belonged to Suzanne Patmore-Gibbs, who helped develop Grey‘s during her 11-year tenure at ABC (her role as executive vp scripted dramas was eliminated in March).

“I saw her speak on a panel. Her hair was super-long, in braids; she was in her early 20s,” says Patmore-Gibbs. “I remember thinking, ‘This is not a girl.’ Her presence, her material, her depth. It was like she was already 40. I knew I’d work with her someday.”

In 2001, she rented a house in Vermont for a month with a plan to finish a screenplay. The first morning she was there, the twin towers came down. She spent the next few days in a state of anxiety. She made a list of all the things she most wanted to do in life, and at the very top was adopt a baby.

Nine months and two days after 9/11, at 32, she adopted her daughter, Harper, and became a single mother.

I had a child and I was stuck at home suddenly, because when you have a child you cannot leave the house, and I started watching television which I hadn't really been doing before and realized that all of the great character development that I had been wishing for in movies was happening on television.

I watched 24 hours of 24… in 24 hours, like it was that fast, and thought like, wow this is interesting, and so I went to my agents and said, “Can I have a chance of doing this?”

I went to the meeting, started thinking of ideas, started pitching, did the work of research, figuring out what was going to work, pitched an idea, didn't have that one go, pitched another idea, I think I pitched maybe three ideas, and they said sure, like do this one.

The March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq was unkind to Rhimes, who by then had written a pilot for ABC about sexy, young globe-trotting war correspondents.

“She did a great job, but the war put a damper on it,” says Rhimes’ longtime producing partner Betsy Beers of the project’s demise. “I was amazed by what she was able to absorb and learn without ever giving up her point of view.”

I really wanted to make something that they wanted and then it was about making something that I wanted to see. Like I was an audience that I knew if I made something I wanted to see I was gonna be passionate about it.

So I started talking to young female surgical residents about what their lives were like and I'd been watching all those weird surgery shows that used to be on TLC where they would remove like giant tumors from people and I thought that was super interesting and melding those two ideas really came together.

I was a woman. I was interested in surgery. I had the idea of surgery, why would I be writing about a dude? Like it didn't make any sense to me. It felt like it made sense to me to write about young people entering this new profession and to make it a woman and then to make it a bunch of different kinds of people.

Ranking a dominant No. 1 in its time period, "Grey's Anatomy" leads its closest competition by 7.2 million viewers (17.8 million vs. 10.6 million - CBS) and beats the combined delivery of CBS and NBC by 22% among Adults 18-49 (7.7/19 vs. 6.3/15).

Along with delivering ABC's best audience retention yet coming out of "Desperate Housewives," the new show is also producing ABC's strongest series performance in the hour in more than four years.

"Grey's Anatomy" qualifies as the most-watched new midseason drama on all of television in 12 years (since CBS' "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" in 1993) and in 13 years among Adults 18-49 (since ABC's "Indiana Jones Chronicles" in 1992).

You see, Shondaland, the imaginary land of Shonda, has existed since I was 11 years old.

I built it in my mind as a place to hold my stories. A safe place. A space for my characters to exist. A space for ME to exist. Until I could get the hell out of being a teenager and could run out into the world and be myself.

Less isolated, less marginalized, less invisible in the eyes of my peers.

Until I could find my people in the real world.

After seven seasons, Grey‘s, still averaging about 12 million viewers a week, is ABC’s most valuable property — a 30-second ad spot goes for about $222,000 — and the third-most-profitable network drama after Glee and House; the Grey‘s spinoff Private attracts more than 8 million viewers, and ads go for about $143,000.

She only does press when her publicist forces her to. She doesn’t allow reporters on the sets of her shows (she also rarely visits the sets herself because she prefers to “remain a fan”).

She claims to not read reviews — that was probably a good thing with Off the Map — and treats her actors and producers like family, who in turn describe her as “an amazing teacher” and “a maternal figure.”

She rarely attends industry events and prefers to spend what little free time she has with her 9-year-old daughter, Harper (named for author Harper Lee), whom she adopted in 2002 a year before she wrote the Grey’s pilot.

As the audacity of “Scandal” has increased, so have its ratings. The series now averages an especially impassioned eight million viewers a week, making it the No. 1 drama at 10 p.m. on any night, on any network, among the most desired demographic, adults 18 to 49.

It has also become a highly “social” show: on Thursday nights, Twitter becomes a giant “Scandal” chat room, fans of the show dispatching more than 190,000 tweets per episode, a good portion of which contain at least one “OMG.”

I used to jokingly say I want to take over the world through television and I'll be honest it was not a joke for me, I really thought I want to take over the world through television.

If I'm gonna do something, I'm gonna be really good at it and that had been my first show so it felt like a fluke and I didn't want it to feel like a fluke to me so I wanted to do more.

But also it was this feeling of you know in the beginning you made a show and it had gone for one season or two seasons or three seasons, I thought, “Well, we could get canceled at any minute, this could go away at any second, I need a second line.”

So it really was about finding another show just in case. It was that thing of like keep something else going.

In the beginning it was about like overworking myself almost to the point of full-out exhaustion, not really understanding what needed to be done and then it really was figuring out how to build the infrastructure.

I had a non-writing producing partner which was really helpful. Then it was taking the people who I'd worked with for a long enough time and spreading them out to understand like you guys go be where I can't be because I already trust you and getting the talent pool large enough and training people enough to the way I thought so that if I wasn't there looking, they were, and trusting people.

You cannot do a job like that if you don't trust the people around you, otherwise you're going to be trying to do everything and that's gonna flatten you very quickly.

Things that involve writing are not work… that is not something I need to figure out how to have time to do… This is like breathing for me, it’s not labor intensive in the way that I think for other people they imagine it to be.

Work will happen 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year if you let it. We are all in that place where we’re all letting it for some reason and I don’t know why. And it suddenly occurred to me that unless I just say, “That’s not going to happen” it was always going to happen.

At work I have a rule that you’re not allowed to come into my office unless you’re coming into my office with a solution to a problem, and not with a problem...

We have four shows shooting at once at this moment—Grey’s Anatomy, The Catch, How To Get Away With Murder, and Still Star-Crossed, which is an untitled Shonda Rhimes project shooting in Spain right now. And we’re also double-shooting episodes of Grey’s.

So for instance, we have a scheduling problem where actors have [to appear] in several [concurrent shoots]. Does it mean I need to change a story to accommodate that? Or does it mean the story is more important, and we have to change the booking?

I want you to come into my office with some plans for what you think can happen. Don’t come in with a fire that’s already lit—I want to know how you think the fire is gonna be put out, and then we can talk.

I work a lot, very hard, and I love it. When I am hard at work, when I am deep in it, there is no other feeling.

For me, my work is at all times building a nation out of thin air. It is manning the troops. It is painting a canvas. It is hitting every high note. It is running a marathon. It is being Beyonce. And it is all of those things at the same time.

I love working. It is creative and mechanical and exhausting and exhilarating and hilarious and disturbing and clinical and maternal and cruel and judicious. And what makes it all so good is the hum.

There is some kind of shift inside me when the work gets good. A hum begins in my brain and it grows and it grows and that hum sounds like the open road and I could drive it forever.

I said yes to less work and more play, and somehow I still run my world. My brain is still global. My campfires still burn.

The more I play, the happier I am, and the happier my kids are. The more I play, the more I feel like a good mother. The more I play, the freer my mind becomes. The more I play, the better I work. The more I play, the more I feel the hum, the nation I’m building, the marathon I’m running, the troops, the canvas, the high note, the hum, the hum, the other hum, the real hum, life’s hum.

The more I feel that hum, the more this strange, quivering, uncocooned, awkward brand new, alive non-titan feels like me. The more I feel that hum, the more I know who I am. I’m a writer, I make stuff up, I imagine. That part of the job, that’s living the dream. That’s the dream of the job. Because a dream job should be a little bit dreamy.

Rhimes has been particularly inventive in helping to build a loyal audience for her shows. She “very smartly understood how the internet was blooming and used it as an opportunity for that kind of direct feedback,” says Channing Dungey, president of ABC Entertainment.

Rhimes was early to embrace blogging: She and other Grey’s writers would riff on episodes and created separate blogs for several of the characters.

Rhimes was instrumental in creating podcasts featuring interviews with actors and writers from her shows. The Grey’s one ran for 35 episodes, and a broader Shondaland podcast has been running since 2012.

“We kept trying to explore different ways of giving people access to a different side of the story,” says Beers, who is Shondaland’s resident podcast host. Rhimes, Washington, and the rest of the Scandal cast were among the first TV creators to live-tweet episodes and craft hashtags around events in each episode, making it the rare scripted series that needed to be watched live to be fully appreciated.

I felt like I was dying. Like I’d been pushing the same ball up the same hill in the exact same way for a really long time.

The reason I came to Netflix is because I wanted to be able to make television without anybody bothering me and as long as I get to keep making television without anybody bothering me, I’m happy.

To go from making 24 episodes of something a year to 8 was startling. I was like, the luxury of that is just insane.

ABC has a very specific audience of people who watch shows on ABC. They have a brand themselves and there's a group of people they are making shows for. They have advertisers who they need to keep happy and there's a system and I think that that's great. I mean, look, that's what's been working.

So Netflix, this thing is very different, the idea for Netflix is my job is to make shows that make people want to subscribe to Netflix which is very different than keeping people watching.

I mean this, it's just different bringing people to the show for a specific hour of time, so it means we can make almost anything as long as it's good. So for us, it's been really fun to expand the content of what we're making while still keeping what I know are the same core audience members in our minds.

I feel like I’m at a phase in my life where I'm not running on the treadmill of fear and now I'm able to just put it out there and enjoy it.

I'm no longer like, “This will be the end of me.” It's just like, I hope people like this. And that's been amazing. It's a crazy feeling because I've truly never felt this way before.

Power isn’t power if you don’t know you have it. If you don’t know you have the power and you’re not using it then you’re not powerful at all. That’s a lesson I’ve learned over and over and over again I think.

I'm very disciplined when on a project. I try to write every day at the same time… that almost never works.

But over the years, I have sort of trained my brain that if I have on my headphones and there's certain kinds of music playing, I can write anywhere. I can write an airport, I can write at the playground, I can literally write anywhere.

I like really interesting, hard-working people. For me, it's not about pedigree or any of that - It's about output. What have you done? What have you done that's creative? How have you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps?

We have a wonderful girl who works for us who doesn't have a car and so she used to Uber everywhere she goes, which in LA is like a nightmare, and part of her job is going to a million different places, but she is such a hardworking, amazing person.

We hired her anyway. It doesn't matter, we're gonna figure out how to make that work, and we did. So to me it's about people who are passionate about what they do, who are going to sort of eat, sleep, and breathe it.

I also like people who know how to have a life outside [of work] because the more creative you can be on the outside the more you bring to the inside.

I think a lot of people dream. And while they are busy dreaming, the really happy people, the really successful people, the really interesting, powerful, engaged people? Are busy doing.

The dreamers. They stare at the sky and they make plans and they hope and they think and they talk about it endlessly. And they start a lot of sentences with “I want to be…” or “I wish”

“I want to be a writer.”

“I wish I could travel around the world.”

And they dream of it. The buttoned up ones meet for cocktails and they all brag about their dreams. The hippie ones have vision boards and they meditate on their dreams. You write in your journal about your dreams. Or discuss it endlessly with your best friend or your girlfriend or your mother. And it feels really good. You’re talking about it. You’re planning it. Kind of. You are blue-skying your life. And that is what everyone says you should do. Right? That’s what Oprah and Bill Gates did to get successful, right?

NO.

Dreams are lovely. But they are just dreams. Fleeting, ephemeral. Pretty. But dreams do not come true just because you dream them. It’s hard work that makes things happen. It’s hard work that creates change.