R. Kikuo Johnson

I've had unusual luck with adaptations of my novels. With Election, I handed my manuscript over to director Alexander Payne and he made this amazing movie—true to the book but with a heightened satiric sensibility. I really loved the film that Todd Field made of Little Children; it's darker than my novel, but it's erotically charged, morally provocative, and packs a real dramatic punch. Still, turning a novel into a film can be limiting—forcing a big, complex story into a small box. And watching all the great TV over the past 10 years, I started to think, wouldn't it be fantastic to have a bigger box? The Leftovers was my first opportunity to venture into long-form television, and I was lucky enough to have Damon Lindelof, cocreator of Lost, as a partner.

The Leftovers is a book that grew out of another book. While doing research for my novel The Abstinence Teacher, I kept bumping into the evangelical Christian concept of the Rapture. I'm not a religious person, and I found myself thinking about the Rapture not as a theological concept but as a powerful metaphor for getting older, for living with loss and mystery. That idea turned into The Leftovers, where 2 percent of the world's population has just disappeared without any explanation. There's no scientific or religious narrative that can make sense of the event; it just seems random. I wanted to tell an apocalyptic story that didn't involve a nuclear holocaust or a zombie invasion. The Leftovers takes place in a world that looks exactly like the world we live in now. It's not about how we survive when there's no food and no clean water, but how we endure when everything we believed has been, if not obliterated, then seriously challenged.

People have pointed out that there's some similarity to Lost in that the characters are dealing with a profoundly mysterious situation. But it's not set on a desert island; it's set in a recognizable suburban town. (Coincidentally, Damon and I grew up about 20 minutes apart in New Jersey.) In some ways, this has put Damon in a very different storytelling universe than Lost. But The Leftovers will probably provoke some of the same reactions from the audience—the excitement of exploring the mystery through the lives of a broad range of characters and, possibly, some frustration when the show doesn't produce a simple explanation for what happened.

In The Leftovers, Justin Theroux plays Kevin Garvey, a father trying to maintain normalcy in the face of chaos. Paul Schiraldi/HBO

Damon is a more visceral and intuitive writer than I am, with a real gift for creating suspense and generating surprises. I think he enjoys it when he shocks me with a wild idea, but once he executes it, I end up agreeing with him 90 percent of the time. It's crazy to watch him work; he'll go into a kind of trance and start telling you the movie he's seeing in his head. It's like having my story filtered through an imagination that works on a very different frequency than my own. And often those visions will end up onscreen, almost completely intact. The other 10 percent of the time, I push back and try to talk him out of something or slow him down. And to his credit, he listens. That's the give and take of collaboration. One thing I've learned over the years is that there's a certain amount of surrender involved in this. You have to go into it with openness and enthusiasm, a willingness to reimagine the world you created in the novel.

When Damon and I wrote the first version of the script, HBO said, “We really like it, but we're concerned that the main character is too nice a guy.” In the book he's a good man; he's the mayor, trying to keep his family and community together under dire circumstances. Cable TV viewers tend to be drawn to darker, more dangerous, morally ambiguous characters: Tony Soprano, Rust Kohle, Walter White, etc. The transformation of Kevin Garvey (played by Justin Theroux) was part of my collaboration with Damon, but it was also the result of the influence of HBO as another voice in the conversation. Making the character the town's police chief—a more violent and conflicted position—has definitely made the show more electric.

It's exciting to see the story unfold on such a large canvas and to live with the characters over time. We're working on the final episodes of the first season now—we had an idea of where we wanted to go, but we're getting there by a radically different route than we expected. Surprising yourself is one of the true pleasures of storytelling. And yes, we know the ending … until we decide to change it.