"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!"

Ben Elton argues for a paradoxical discipline: absorb the novel until its heartbeat is inside you, then let go of the pages. The aim is not disrespect but liberation. A film or stage piece must be engineered for a different machine, with different fuel. Prose can linger in consciousness, braid backstory, and live on interior voices; screen and stage demand rhythm, image, action, silence, and performance. Fidelity to the letter risks taxidermy, perfectly preserved, lifeless. Once the adaptor comprehends the novel’s core, its moral tension, tonal signature, and emotional arc, they must stop being a reader and become an author in a new medium.

“Throw it away” is a guardrail against timidity. When the book sits open on the desk, scenes get translated instead of transformed, structure gets obeyed rather than exploited, and exposition crowds out cinema. Freed from the text, the adaptor can compress timelines, forge composite characters, invent connective tissue, strip subplots, and reorder events to serve momentum and clarity. What survives is the story’s pulse: the dilemma that matters, the relationships that wound and heal, the worldview that gives it sting. The guiding question shifts from “What happened in the book?” to “What must happen now for this work to breathe on stage or screen?”

Of course there’s a risk of betrayal. Audiences bring affection and memory, and the author’s voice has claims. The antidote isn’t slavish fidelity; it’s fidelity to essence. Courage is required to cut a beloved chapter, to craft a new ending, or to translate an internal monologue into a single look. That courage should be matched by rigor: test choices against theme, tone, and character truth. When done well, the adaptation stands on its own feet, conversing with its source rather than kneeling to it. The best adaptations feel inevitable in their new form, as if the story had been waiting all along to be told this way.