Soon after my first book, The Doorbells of Florence, came out in the US, someone called Jack contacted me and asked if we could meet. He had loved the idea of the book, which contains photographs of doorbells and fictional stories about the people who might live behind each bell – and he wanted to turn it into a ballet.

When I started writing the stories and posting them on Flickr under the tag "flicktion" in 2004, it was all about picking out details from the photography, using real life as an inspiration for magical fiction. When I decided to turn the stories into a book, other factors came into play: working on the design and feel of the physical object, carefully choosing the order of the stories so that they fitted together as a single work, rewriting as necessary. But it was still about the photography, and the experience of reading.

Although the ballet is yet to happen, this week a theatrical adaptation of my book opened in London, also called The Doorbells of Florence. I haven't seen it yet – I'm going next week, and because I live overseas, I haven't been able to see any rehearsals. But I know one thing for sure: it's nothing like my book. And that's no bad thing.

A play is a live performance, an interaction with the space and with an audience, who are expected to sit quietly and consume the entire story in one sitting (or two, if there's an interval). Books are a different beast altogether. When I read a book, I'm reading what the writer has written, in my own time and at my own pace. When I watch a play or a film, or even listen to a song, I receive the writer's words mediated through the director, performers, producer, designer, crew, at a speed and in a style that they determine. When it really works, it's nothing like a book at all – it's something else entirely, and all the better for it.

I have no idea if I'll like the staging of The Doorbells of Florence (though my spies suggest I will). Who knows what Poe or Shakespeare would make of Punchdrunk's immersive theatrical adaptations of their work, but I had a great time watching them. Heinrich Hoffman's poetry book Shockheaded Peter was not intended to be a songbook for a ghoulish polka band, with puppets acting out the stories – but that doesn't mean such a version couldn't work; I went to see the stage show three times. The musical Spring Awakening, despite announcing an early West End closure this week, has nevertheless been a critical success, even if the same audiences would almost certainly not go to a music-free production of Wedekind's original play. And, contrary to those movie snobs who like to say "the book was better", I firmly believe that the quality of anything has to be evaluated by the medium it's in, not the one that inspired it. You can like both tomatoes and ketchup without having to choose just one.

From what I understand, The Doorbells of Florence is a play about the art of storytelling. It uses my original images as flickering inspirations for leaps of imagination; the two actors treat the images much as we might use a bonfire to tell ghost stories. A part of me wonders whether I won't like what they've done to my stories, and whether I'll sit through the show muttering to myself that they've completely failed to grasp why I wrote the book in the first place.

However, I also know that it doesn't matter what I think: I'm only the writer.