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Horses as life-size puppets? The wrong soldier executed? Michael Morpurgo has had to challenge his own preconceptions when seeing his books adapted for stage or screen. But with Spielberg's War Horse film forthcoming and The Rainbow Bear a ballet, he's getting used to good surprises

Peter and the Wolf on the gramophone, and seeing Beauty and the Beast at the Player's Theatre.

So I was a secret theatrical aspirations. I just kept writing, hoping the phone rang. When that did not have children 's Film Foundation, who wanted to make a film about Friend or Foe, a story I'd written about boys evacuated to Devon with their school during the second world war. I was asked whether or not I'd like to write the screenplay, and knowing nothing about screenwriting, I turned it down. I was of course thrilled to be sitting there in a cinema watching my story unfolding in front of me. It was a modest film, well acted, and it did well enough. For me as a writer, the consequence was that publishers took me slightly more seriously. I was now B+ in their eyes, no longer B-. That was something.

It should be a while before the phone rang again. This time the story of the filming was to be the film itself. Why the Whales Came is set on Bryher, in the Isles of Scilly, and is about two children who befriend a reclusive old man of whom the whole community is afraid. It's the story of their secret friendship with him and what happens when they find a narwhal stranded on the beach.

The islanders, understandably, were rather peeved, and decided not to allow the film crew off the island until the money for the accommodation was paid. There was quite a to-do in the press. Book sales soared. In the end, the crew were taken off by helicopter, and I thought that was that. Then, some months later, the producer Simon Channing Williams came to the island and, with director Clive Rees, revived the entire project. Within a year, we were filming. The extraordinary cast included Paul Scofield, Helen Mirren, David Threlfall and David Suchet. I hoped we might be making the best British family film since The Railway Children. But it wasn't to be. Maybe it was my script, but the whole story seemed to have lost its narrative drive. It didn't work.

I decided to write no more than a movie script. But then, when Portobello Films asked me to write a screenplay about My Friend Walter I thought I'd give it another go. It's a story about the ghost of Walter Raleigh returning to haunt the farm he had grown up on in East Budleigh in Devon. The director Gavin Millar and producer Vanessa Lees coached me through, and we got it right in the end.

Emboldened to try my hand again, I took up Channing Williams's invitation to write a screenplay for War Horse. For five years the two of us worked on the script, and tried to raise the finance. In the end we had to admit defeat. He went on to work alongside Mike Leigh, and then, later, teamed up with John le Carré to bring The Constant Gardener to the big screen. He died last year, all too young, a great loss to the British film industry.

But these five years of fruitless efforts to make the film War Horse convinced me enough was enough â€" that I could never stand back from my original stories sufficiently to write really good screenplays. I had to admit to myself that it was another art, another marvellous magic, and I just wasn't that kind of magician.

Currently I am more and more to the scene. The first evidence that some of the enthusiasm for the adaptation of my short stories in the theater came from the school. This or that story is currently serving as a school play, I saw one or two, and immediately felt a thrill all of this.

So when I had my first approach from the professional theatre, I leapt. The Alibi Theatre in Exeter wanted to put on Why the Whales Came. I didn't want to adapt it myself; I'd learned my lesson. But I was invited to rehearsals, to talk to the actors, discuss motivation, back stories, the music, even the set design, and I found there was something I could offer â€" some insights into plot and character that they found useful. I was rather concerned when I discovered there would be a cellist on stage throughout, a kind of musical chorus. I thought it would be too distracting, but I was wrong. The music gave the play its tone and texture. It played to packed houses, and spent a month at the Comedy Theatre in the West End.

Other early experiences staging, were less successful, but the Polka Theatre in Wimbledon does not disappoint when they are produced s Kensuke 'Kingdom . This is my story of a boy who is cast away on an island in the Pacific and finds he has to share the island with an ancient Japanese sailor who has been marooned there since the second world war. The production was beautifully staged and acted, but there was one moment I thought was ill-advised. Kensuke is telling the story of how his family were killed in Nagasaki when the atom bomb fell. In my book, as he tells the tale, we see the tragedy for ourselves. In the play, they used a puppet of a dead child, blackened, shrivelled, terrible. When I first saw it, I felt the shock of the moment, as the audience took it in, this sharp reminder of the horror of war. It was great theatre, unforgettable â€" I'd been totally wrong.

About 10 years ago, I wrote the third story of the First World War, after War Horseand The Butterfly Lion. Private Peaceful tells of the last night of a young soldier's life before he is shot at dawn for cowardice. Simon Reade, then the artistic director at the Bristol Old Vic, heard about it and told me he wanted to produce it as a one-man show. But, he warned me, for this to work dramatically, it would have to have another ending, a radically different ending. It's the tale of the journey of two brothers, from their childhood deep in the peace of rural Devon, to the horrors of the trenches. The story is told by Tommo, but much of it is about Charlie, his elder brother. As Tommo tells it, the reader realises that he is dreading the coming of dawn. Only as the book ends do we understand that it is Charlie who is to be shot for desertion, not Tommo.

In Reade's play, Tommo is executed at the end. How would I feel about this? I was hesitant, but in the end had to agree that, in a one-man show, this was how it should be. Reade consulted me on the script and invited me to auditions. It played at the Bristol Old Vic, with Paul Chequer as Tommo, and afterwards at the Edinburgh Fringe and then London. Scamp Productions has since taken it up and down the country and off-Broadway.

The response has been fascinating. The book is studied in schools, and as it has gradually become better known â€" largely through the play â€" audiences have raised the question about the altered ending. Opinion is divided. Usually those who have read the book first prefer the ending they know â€" not an uncommon reaction â€" but it's an ongoing debate.

Bristol Old Vic has also created the most original adaptation of its Aesop's Fables. (Note the "my" â€" see how I take possession of the old Greek's fables I adapted myself.) Scamp took the hugely witty production to Edinburgh, to Australia and then toured it widely. Then it morphed into a radio broadcast, word for word, song for song, on Radio 4 on Christmas Eve 2008 â€" no need for further adaptation, old Greek to stage play to radio play, seamlessly. I had little input on this production. They didn't need me, they had Aesop.

Reade has adapted many others of my stories for the stage, among them Tora! Tora! and The Mozart Question. When I sought to find out why he has gone back to graze in the same field of dreams, my field, he told me: "I'd adapted Ted Hughes (Tales from Ovid) and Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children) and Jill Tomlinson (The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark

As a writer who often works alone, I love to collaborate, to find ways of extending the nature of this metamorphosis. With Simon Reade, and John Tams, and the a capella group Coope Boyes and Simpson, we've been putting on a dozen concerts a year, weaving story and music around books such as Private Peaceful, War Horse , On Angel Wings, The best Christmas gift in the world , and Mozart Question . We perform all over the country, in village halls and churches, in theatres and concert halls and cathedrals. I get to read my own stories, alongside wonderful actors, and sometimes I even get to sing. It gives me a chance to be what I always wanted to be â€" an actor.

The War Horse journey, from idea, to book, to play, to film, has been an experience all of its own. War Horse was published in 1982. It's the story of a young horse, Joey, brought up by Albert, a farmer's son. When Joey is sold off to the army by Albert's father, as a cavalry horse at the start of the first world war, Albert joins up to go looking for him. The narrative is told by the horse, because I wanted this to be a story of universal suffering in the war, not told from one side or the other. But talking horses don't work on stage, except in pantomime. Besides, I thought the epic nature of War Horse would be impossible and impracticable to stage, and to film â€" I had already had one experience of this being the case. Then, with great excitement, I heard it was being considered by the National Theatre as a successor to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials and Jamila Gavin's Coram Boy. I was told the horses were to be puppets, life-size puppets. I could not possibly imagine how that might work. But one meeting at the National with Tom Morris and Nick Hytner, followed by a meeting with puppeteers Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones, was enough to convince me that this might just be something groundbreaking.

"If I'm reading a book with a view to turning it into a show," Morris, the production's prime mover, told me, "I look for five things: story, world, themes, characters and theatrical opportunity. With War Horse, the story was simple and powerful, and the world of the first world war remains present and (in understanding our own folly) of enduring importance. But the thing that made it irresistible was the way in which theme, character and theatrical opportunity combined in the challenge of representing the horse. It created the perfect reason for Adrian Kohler to design a puppet that extended all previous rules of theatre-making."

The film producer Kathleen Kennedy happened to see the play on a visit to London and brought it to the attention of Steven Spielberg. Now the dream Channing Williams and I had of making a film is finally happening. Lee Hall (Billy Elliot, The Pitmen Painters) And Richard Curtis wrote the script. I 't think that' s much I can teach them, and not much else that I can teach a director or producer of the film. When I write these lines, they shoot him on Dartmoor, and 'rain. Well, Devon ', and from August'.

But there's also a new departure, a new excitement â€" a ballet. Many years ago I asked Stephen Barlow, conductor and composer, if he would consider writing the music to accompany The Rainbow Bear, about a polar bear who becomes obsessed with hunting rainbows rather than food. I wanted, I suppose, to find a way of making another Peter and the Wolf.

A year later he had put together and recorded a wonderfully evocative symphonic poem. His wife, Joanna Lumley, read the story to accompany his music. The piece was later premiered in Lausanne; then came news that The Rainbow Bear was to be performed by the National Youth Ballet with choreography by Jo Meredith. One hundred or more young dancers will be on stage, and I will be there in the audience, watching it all, wide-eyed with wonder â€" just as I was when I first went to the theatre all those years ago and saw Beauty and the Beast.

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