LOVELL, Maine — Rosie’s General Store serves breakfast all day, and it’s the type of place where residents of this town of 1,140 will stop in to buy lottery tickets, a loaf of bread or the special jumbo lobster roll. It’s also the inspiration for the Sweetbriar Rose, a diner in Stephen King’s 2009 opus about a small town cut off from the outside world by a mysterious and impenetrable dome.

A television adaptation of that novel, “Under the Dome,” will have its premiere on Monday night on CBS, which was why Mr. King found himself talking one day recently with the real-life Rose about the TV version of her character, one of nearly 70 in his 1,074-page doorstop of a novel. “I told you I want to be taller and thinner,” Rose McKenzie told Mr. King heartily as he ate blueberry pancakes with maple syrup.

“And through the power of narration, you are,” he assured her.

After nearly 100 television and film adaptations of his novels and short stories, Mr. King is used to the Hollywood version of his characters ending up younger and more glamorous than their often-haggard literary counterparts. It’s one of those things he doesn’t try to fight. He has developed a rule about collaborating on adaptations of his work: “Usually my attitude is go all the way in or all the way out, but don’t be a noodge,” Mr. King said.

But he’s being something of a noodge about “Under the Dome.” After reading the script for a coming episode, Mr. King was concerned that in it, Jim Rennie Jr., the degenerate son of the town’s alpha male, says that he scraped his hand while cutting wood with an ax. “I said, ‘Ax and hand, really?’ ’ Mr. King said. “I had them change it to hatchet.” A hatchet’s blade is closer to the user’s hand, he explained.