Thursday, June 17, 2010

Alan Ball’s ‘True Blood’s Writing Process: It All Begins With the Books:

True Blood‘ fans would give up their own blood to be a fly on the wall of the show’s writers’ room.  Season three’s plot twists are a closely guarded secret.  Many have wondered what mysterious alchemy transforms Charlaine Harris’s best selling Sookie Stackhouse books into the brilliant insanity of ‘True Blood.’  Series creator and showrunner Alan Ball shined enough light to incinerate a vampire on the writing process in time for Sunday’s premiere (HBO, 9/8c).
Step 1: It All Begins With the Books:
“We always start with the books.  We have been sort of focusing on one of Charlaine’s books per season so we started with the third book, which is called Club Dead.  As always, our big challenge in translating books to the series is to open up the world outside of Sookie’s experience because Sookie [Anna Paquin] is the narrator of the books so the books are basically her story.  So we look at what the books have and figure out a way to give all of other major characters stories that will somehow fold into the main story, the Sookie/Bill story.  That’s what we did, just like we did the first two seasons.”
Deciding when to deviate from the Books:
“It’s a totally organic process.  A lot of times there are a lot of people pitching ideas.  A lot of times we’ll find if we totally stick to the books here, how is that going to affect later on because we’re breaking the story three of four episodes down the line.  It’s like well what if he wasn’t this but he was this instead? There’s not a formula. It’s pretty much gut instinct.”

read on

1 comments:

Rita said...

Well i don't mind how AB writes as long
as he and the other writers just keep us
watching and wondering.No one writes the same,and it would be boring if they did.