Kohan, who also created “Weeds” and is an executive producer for “GLOW,” reflected on why she finds dramedy more realistic than straight drama, how she shapes her characters’ back stories and why she tells her kids to talk to strangers. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

How does it feel to be coming to the end of seven seasons of the show?

It’s a mixed bag. I’m ready to be out of prison. It takes up a lot of psychological space, and it can be oppressive and difficult and depressing. But it was a privilege to do this show. The people that came together to build it and inhabit it were remarkable, and the fact that we got to normalize diversity — it’s really hard to give that up. But seven years is a good run, and it was time.

The early seasons explored how and why women end up in prison, and this final season seems really to focus on how incarceration changes people. When did you know the shape of different characters’ arcs?

Every year, we start three or four months before shooting as a writers’ room, and we talk about our goals, about issues we want to write about, about stories we want to tell. That’s how the season begins to take shape. So, by the time we start writing, we’ve spent weeks and weeks just throwing things on the board, and figuring out those arcs and those stories.