Adapting a novel is not really about being faithful to every word and every moment the author has created. It's more about that same story being filtered through somebody else's sensibility.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I think my background in film taught me that a great book adaptation is not always slavishly faithful to the source material.
The problem with books, now that I've written one, is that the idea of adaptation is so much easier than sitting down to write something new.
The issue of doing an adaptation of a book is the theater of the mind, and so you always face that.
Writers who want to interfere with adaptations of their work are basically undemocratic. The book still stands as an entity on its own.
Often in the past, there have been authors that were deeply disappointed in their adaptation, but that's because they haven't accepted the fact that a movie is a different thing, and it can't possibly be the same as the book.
Every reader re-creates a novel - in their own imagination, anyway. It's only entirely the writer's when nobody else has read it.
Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.
A great literary work can be completely, completely unpredictable. Which can sometimes make them very hard to read, but it gives them a great originality.
I'm not setting out to adapt books and work with books, but when really amazing stories come to you in that form, it's really hard to turn away from that.
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!