“From Scratch ”Screenwriter Attica Locke Calls Adaptations 'Like Covers of a Song' — Here's Her Dream Casting for Hers (Exclusive)

The producer of 'Little Fires Everywhere' shares wisdom from Celeste Ng and what it's like working with her sister, Tembi Locke

Attica Locke worked as a screenwriter before she ever started writing novels, and maybe that's where her attitude toward book-to-screen adaptations comes from.

The author of books like Black Water Rising, The Cutting Season and her Highway 59 series, which concludes with Guide Me Home, out Sept. 3, spoke to PEOPLE about her work on both the page and screen — and the differences between the two.

The author has worked as a producer and screenwriter on shows like When They See Us, Empire, From Scratch and the Emmy-nominated Little Fires Everywhere, for which she won an NAACP Image Award. But it was in making the latter where she first heard the wisdom she still carries with her today.

"Celeste Ng said, 'It's like you guys are doing a cover of my book like a cover song,' " Locke recalls, referring to the author, whose novel serves as the basis for the Hulu limited series starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington.

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She adds, "And she came into the writers room and was able to riff and play and pitch things that were not in her book. What grace she had doing that, and what fun she had, because she was confident in what she'd already created. Watching that made me realize how you should approach an adaptation."

This is not Locke's first adaptation rodeo, either. She has an overall deal with her sister, Tembi Locke, with Universal Television, and is set to adapt her novel Bluebird, Bluebird into a drama, per Deadline. The sister duo previously created and executive produced a Netflix series starring Zoe Saldaña inspired by Tembi's memoir, From Scratch.

"Having done several adaptations. I am a believer that the television show should have things that the book doesn't have," Attica continues, of what she hopes for Black Texas Ranger Darren Mathews, the character at the center of Bluebird, Bluebird. "The book should have things that the television show doesn't have, so he will be a slightly different character. I look forward to finding him. It'll be interesting to to do the adaptation with my sister after we did an adaptation of her book. So it's kind of this reverse thing."

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The sisters work well together, which Attica calls "a blessing I never saw coming."

"We laugh so hard. I mean, you know all those memes about sisters," she says, chuckling at the thought. "They can't get a breath out because they start laughing so hard. The other thing is, we have such a shared value system, even though we come at stories from a different point of view."

And while she doesn't want to jinx casting for her main character, the author does have a dream man for Mathews' twin uncles.

"I'm such a humongous fan of Jeffrey Wright," Attica confesses. "I've always had this fantasy of him playing both uncles, the one that's a Texas Ranger who believes in the law and the one who is a gritty, more caustic criminal defense attorney who does not believe in the law. I've had a fantasy of that for a very long time, and it probably will never happen, which is why I can just say it freely."

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Guide Me Home by Attica Locke, the final installment in the Highway 59 series, is available now, wherever books are sold.

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