Adaptive Writing Quotes

My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they've read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!

I think if you have a series for a long time, it's in some ways like being in a play with a long run - in that the character stays the same - and so you are constantly posed with the challenge of making it interesting and unique week after week, year after year.

At times when you're adapting a book into a movie, you have to take certain creative liberties to bridge the gap between the two forms of media.

As a writer myself, my job has very often been to also write on the job. So you get the script and a vague idea of how the scene might work, and you then add funny words or change the script. I'm not the world's best writer or the world's best actor, but I can do that thing where I can fix - or ruin - fix-slash-ruin, add quirk, add value.

I've been writing for a long time, since the late '60s. But it hasn't been in the same form. I used to write scripts for television. I wrote for my comedy act. Then I wrote screenplays, and then I started writing New Yorker essays, and then I started writing plays. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the New Yorker essays, but they were comic. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the '90s. In my head, there was a link between everything. One thing led to another.

I do tend to take lines from other lines I like, and then write around them.

It was like a dream come true for me. When you write the book, it's still intimate. It might have been a best-seller but it's still my story, as I wrote it. The moment we or they make a movie, it's not my story anymore. There's a lot of letting go involved in the process.

Writing, for me, is a little like wood carving. You find the lump of tree (the big central theme that gets you started), and you start cutting the shape that you think you want it to be. But you find, if you do it right, that the wood has a grain of its own (characters develop and present new insights, concentrated thinking about the story opens new avenues). If you're sensible, you work with the grain and, if you come across a knot hole, you incorporate that into the design. This is not the same as 'making it up as you go along'; it's a very careful process of control.

When you want to transcribe an idea truthfully from the page to the screen, it is not necessarily best to be particularly literal about it. It can be hard to convince people, specifically writers, of that.

The audience today has heard every joke. They know every plot. They know where you're going before you even start. That's a tough audience to surprise, and a tough audience to write for. It's much more competitive now, because the audience is so much more - I want to say 'sophisticated.'

Going into the second arc, I'm making a conscious effort to do something I say I never do, which is to change my style because of feedback. I'm trying to make 'Pretty Deadly' more accessible by being more clear in the writing.

Writing for videogames is really unique. You learn all the rules of writing, but there's a whole other set of rules for game writing, and we're changing them as we move along as well, which makes it more challenging.

It's very difficult to balance different audiences and talk to each one without selling the others short. There is no universal literature - or, if there is, I don't know how to write it.

What do I want from a book? Something protean, something always on-the-move-or-make - shape-shifting, semantically-and-syntactically-shifting.

Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes.

I guess my approach to adapting books is to treat them with a deep respect on one level and at another level part them to one side and go, 'I'm doing something completely different here.'

There's no point in using someone else's characters if you're going to turn them into your own vision. You have to be loyal to that person's worldview and sensitive to what they would and wouldn't have done with their characters, and how explicit or inexplicit they would've been.

I think my background in film taught me that a great book adaptation is not always slavishly faithful to the source material.

I enjoy adapting my own work, or anybody's work. I like to adapt books.

I always kind of think I don't have a style, just whatever seems to be appropriate for the story.

I love television because it's the most alive, because you don't know how it's going to end. It's a living thing. Sometimes the writers are watching you to see how things will unfold. Sometimes the writers have written it, and you come to it, and they have to change their way of going because of what you've done.

Writing for others is great cos you can tailor it for them.

When I was working on 'Deadwood', it was understood that the script was a work in progress, and when we got to set, everyone would kind of work on it together.

You've got to write for your audience.

I had written in another draft a completely different kind of fight, but they said they couldn't afford to shoot it. They needed a fight scene, though, so I was told to put a fight scene in, but not the one I had written.