How do you begin the process of adapting for movies?

I throw it all out and start over.

You never look at the original material?

When I write a screenplay or stage play based on my work, I never look at the original work. I get the play done, and then I go back and see what I've missed. You can always insert things if they're missing. It's more fun to hear characters speak thirty years later.

I did Farenheit 451 for the stage in Los Angeles two years ago; I just went to the characters, and I said, "Hey, I haven't talked to you in thirty years. Have you grown up? I hope so. I have." And, of course, they had, too. The fire chief came to me and said, "Hey, thirty years ago, when you wrote me down, you forgot to ask me why I burn books." I said, "God damn! Good question. Why do you burn books?" And he told me-a glorious scene that's not in the novel. It's in the play. Now, at some time in the future I'm going to go to the novel, open it up, and shove in the new material, because it's glorious.

Could you do another film about it?

It's not necessary because I love the Truffaut film, but I would like to do a TV special of the play with all the new material; give the fire chief a chance to tell you that he is a failed romantic: he thought books could cure everything. We all think that at a certain time in our lives-don't we?-when we discover books. We think in an emergency all you've got to do is open the Bible or Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson, and we think, "Wow! They know all the secrets."

With all your knowledge of screenwriting and what can and cannot be done on screen, are you not interested in taking the step into directing films?

No, I don't want to handle that many people. A director has got to make forty or fifty people love him or fear him, or a combination of both, all the time. And how do you handle that many people and keep your sanity and your politeness? I'm afraid I would be impatient, which I wouldn't want to be.

I'm accustomed, you see, to getting up every morning, running to the typewriter, and in an hour I've created a world. I don't have to wait for anyone. I don't have to criticize anyone. It's done. All I need is an hour, and I'm ahead of everyone. The rest of the day I can goof off. I've already done a thousand words this morning; so if I want to have a two or three-hour lunch, I can have it, because I've already beat everyone.

But a director says, "Oh, God, my spirits are up. Now, I wonder if I can get everyone else's up." What if my leading lady isn't feeling well today? What if my leading man is cantankerous? How do I handle it?

Your characters never present those problems?

Never. I never put up with anything from my ideas.

You just slap them into place?

As soon as things get difficult, I walk away. That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you. If you try to approach a cat and pick it up, hell, it won't let you do it. You've got to say, "Well, to hell with you." And the cat says, "Wait a minute. He's not behaving the way most humans do." Then the cat follows you out of curiosity: "Well, what's wrong with you that you don't love me?"

Well, that's what an idea is. See? You just say, "Well, hell, I don't need depression. I don't need worry. I don't need to push." The ideas will follow me. When the're off-guard, and ready to be born, I'll turn around and grab them.

1982

ZEN IN THE ART OF WRITING

I selected the above title, quite obviously, for its shock value. The variety of reactions to it should guarantee me some sort of crowd, if only of curious onlookers, those who come to pity and stay to shout. The old sideshow Medicine Men who traveled about our country used calliope, drum, and Blackfoot Indian, to insure open-mouthed attention. I hope I will be forgiven for using ZEN in much the same way, at least here at the start.

For, in the end, you may discover I'm not joking after all.

But, let us grow serious in stages.

Now while I have you here before my platform, what words shall I whip forth painted in red letters ten feet tall?

WORK.

That's the first one.

RELAXATION.

That's the second. Followed by two final ones:

DON'T THINK!

Well, now, what have these words to do with Zen Buddhism. What do they have to do with writing? With me? But, most especially, with you?

First off, let's take a long look at that faintly repellent word WORK. It is, above all, the word about which your career will revolve for a lifetime. Beginning now you should become not its slave, which is too mean a term, but its partner. Once you are really a co-sharer of existence with your work, that word will lose its repellent aspects.

Let me stop here a moment to ask some questions. Why is it that in a society with a Puritan heritage we have such completely ambivalent feelings about Work? We feel guilty, do we not, if not busy? But we feel somewhat soiled, on the other hand, if we sweat overmuch?

I can only suggest that we often indulge in made work, in false business, to keep from being bored. Or worse still we conceive the idea of working for money. The money becomes the object, the target, the end-all and be-all. Thus work, being important only as a means to that end, degenerates into boredom. Can we wonder then that we hate it so?

Simultaneously, others have fostered the notion among the more self-conscious literary that quill, some parchment, an idle hour in midday, a soupcon of ink daintily tapped on paper will suffice, given inspiration's whiff. Said inspiration being, all too often, the latest issue of The Kenyon Review or some other literary quarterly. A few words an hour, a few etched paragraphs per day and – voila! we are the Creator! Or better still, Joyce, Kafka, Sartre!

Nothing could be further from true creativity. Nothing could be more destructive than the two attitudes above.

Why?

Because both are a form of lying.

It is a lie to write in such a way as to be rewarded by money in the commercial market.

It is a lie to write in such a way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary group in the intellectual gazettes.

Do I have to tell you how filled to the brim the literary quarterlies are with young lads and lasses kidding themselves they are creating when all they are doing is imitating the scrolls and flourishes of Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner or Jack Kerouac?

Do I have to tell you how filled to the brim are our women's magazines and other mass circulation publications with yet other lads and lasses kidding themselves they are creating when they are only imitating Clarence Buddington Kelland, Anya Seton, or Sax Rohmer?

The avant-garde liar kids himself he will be remembered for his pedantic lie.

The commercial liar, too, on his own level, kids himself that while he is slanting, it is only because the world is tilted; everyone walks like that!

Now, I would like to believe that everyone reading this article is not interested in those two forms of lying. Each of you, curious about creativity, wants to make contact with that thing in yourself that is truly original. You want fame and fortune, yes, but only as rewards for work well and truly done. Notoriety and a fat bank balance must come after everything else is finished and done. That means that they cannot even be considered while you are at the typewriter. The man who considers them lies one of the two ways, to please a tiny audience that can only beat an Idea insensible and then to death, or a large audience that wouldn't know an Idea if it came up and bit them.