"What's going to be hard for me is to try to divorce myself as much as possible from what I wrote. I'll have to approach it simply as raw material and try to craft a film script out of it"
About this Quote
The pain Chabon names here is the artist's version of breaking up with yourself. Novelists get to be gods: the prose voice is the engine, the texture, the point. Screenwriting, by contrast, is a team sport with a brutal rule: if it can't be seen or heard, it doesn't exist. So "divorce" isn't melodrama; it's craft reality. He's admitting that the part of his work he most identifies with - language as personality, the authorial mind on the page - has to be treated like scrap lumber.
The phrase "raw material" is the tell. It's not humility so much as self-defense. By demoting his own book from sacred object to inventory, he gives himself permission to cut, compress, and betray it. That betraying is essential because adaptation isn't translation; it's triage. Scenes that sing in a novel might be dead air on screen. Interior monologue becomes blocking, dialogue, silence, or disappears.
There's also a quiet flex in the pragmatism. Chabon isn't pining for fidelity; he's positioning himself as someone who understands the industry's grammar. The subtext: authors who cling to their sentences get steamrolled in development hell. He'd rather be the one holding the knife.
Context matters, too: Chabon's career sits in that late-20th/early-21st-century pipeline where literary prestige and Hollywood appetite started courting each other more openly. His quote captures the uneasy bargain at the center of that courtship: to be adapted is to be honored, and to be adapted well is to let your "best" parts get erased.
The phrase "raw material" is the tell. It's not humility so much as self-defense. By demoting his own book from sacred object to inventory, he gives himself permission to cut, compress, and betray it. That betraying is essential because adaptation isn't translation; it's triage. Scenes that sing in a novel might be dead air on screen. Interior monologue becomes blocking, dialogue, silence, or disappears.
There's also a quiet flex in the pragmatism. Chabon isn't pining for fidelity; he's positioning himself as someone who understands the industry's grammar. The subtext: authors who cling to their sentences get steamrolled in development hell. He'd rather be the one holding the knife.
Context matters, too: Chabon's career sits in that late-20th/early-21st-century pipeline where literary prestige and Hollywood appetite started courting each other more openly. His quote captures the uneasy bargain at the center of that courtship: to be adapted is to be honored, and to be adapted well is to let your "best" parts get erased.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by Michael
Add to List
