I am curious exactly how important are books to your life. I ask as the founder of an internationally acclaimed library. Books have been an important part of my life since childhood.
How do books influence your work? Two of the characters in an animated series which I am currently developing are named Barnaby Rudge and Martin Chuzzlewit. Yes, I took them from Charles Dickens. He will not object. So, do books shape you?
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Since I was 8 years old I am never without at least one book at hand. There is such wisdom held within the thousands of books I've read over the years. Yes books refine who reads them. If you visit the libraries in or around your area look at the selections in the young adult and youth books to see where there are missing narratives.
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I found short, snappy descriptions in books effective to adapt into scripts. I've also adapted longer and elaborate descriptions by paring them down.
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I got a library card at five years old. Weekly visits to the library were a must. Discover an author - read all their books - discover another - read all their books - rinse and repeat for decades. Along the way found my solid gold list of particular books. Dickens amongst them.
Started writing books, then screenplays and have been unable and unwilling to stop. The writing is the absolute joy and so to my astonishment I have written 11 books. 3 action 5 scifi and others. The first was published, I had a contract for eight, and three months after the first was, my publisher went bust.
Sold my second (or first) screenplay before the ink was dry. Have had fees, options and assignments, joined pre-production teams, and am creating new movies and pilots etc. two movie projects of my scripts cancelled just before shooting due to finance. Along the way I have adapted about five books by others into screenplays via commissions or invitation, and last year began adapting some of my own.
I pitch with great reserve and do not publish anything online and don’t like CVs and no longer try to publish my books because it’s not worth the effort - takes too long. All of my focus is writing new movies, writing pilots and developing series. Detectives; Action; Comedy, and others.
I recently, just for pure fun, read the complete comedy/law series of Rumpole of the Baillie books by John Mortimer. So despite writing constantly, I still have time to read books whether old or recent, fiction or fact.