The Science of Stephen King

Kelly:“Many of Stephen King’s characters are dark and sinister. How do you write for a character like Joe Goldberg and balance his humanity and his monstrous nature in order for the audience to still connect with him?”

Kara Lee Corthron: “Joe Goldberg is such a fun character to write. It’s not as hard to write for him as you might think. The trick is to understand how Joe sees himself and let that be our guide. Joe sees himself as a feminist and one of the last true romantics willing to do anything for the woman he loves. All of his behavior stems from that place. He’s delusional and his reality is warped, which is an interesting (and often disturbing) POV to put ourselves in. But a consistently compelling creative challenge.”

Meg:“You wrote our favorite episode in season two ofYou, “Fear and Loathing in Beverly Hills.” To us, it felt like it had some influence fromThe Shining. Can you talk about the process for writing that episode in particular?”

Kara Lee Corthron: “Thank you! And you are absolutely correct. We knew early on that Forty was going to give Joe some kind of hallucinogen in this episode, but all The Shining references came during the writing process. Full disclosure: the 1980 movie is one of my all-time faves; long before I was on the You staff, I had a T-shirt with the Grady twins on it and I also got another tee as a gift featuring the carpet from the Overlook Hotel (my Gmail profile pic is a still from the film and has been for a few years). When we realized the episode was going to take place in a hotel during the acid trip, we thought about how horrific that experience would be for Joe—a person more likely to murder the one he loves than to give up his sense of control over her. That coupled with the fact that Forty has them imprisoned in order to write a screenplay—not unlike Jack Torrance moving his family to a remote outpost in order to write a novel—sent us in the direction of The Shining.”

Meg: “We’re Shining fangirls too and have the Grady girls as tattoos!”

Kelly:“How do you navigate changing some key plot points when adapting a novel to the screen like the writers did for the seriesYou?”

Kara Lee Corthron: “There are just different considerations. For the show, we have to think about increasing tension and suspense over a set amount of time. For You, it’s ten episodes a season. We’re essentially telling the story in increments as though it were one long novel whereas Caroline has more control when she writes a book, deciding when and where to pick up in her Joe Goldberg story and adding or subtracting characters according to what feels right for the book version of Joe. We have other considerations like casting. For instance, if Caroline decided she wanted to write a book that begins with Joe at age sixty, we wouldn’t be able to do that because our lead actor is a crucial part of the show’s success and he’s a thirty-three-year-old man. Sometimes it also comes down to elements that make good TV that might not be the case for fiction. For example, the Joe/Paco storyline in season one was very popular with some of the higher-ups in our studio and network, which led us to create a similar, but different dynamic in season two with the Joe/Ellie storyline. Neither of those arcs exist in the books, but they worked really well on TV.”

Meg:“Do you have a favorite Stephen King novel or movie/television adaptation? What is it about the work that you like?”