Kill your darlings6/10/2023 ![]() ![]() The phrase rings true because writers, who labor over their ideas and words like expectant mothers, invariably fall in love with their offspring and are reluctant to find fault, and even more reluctant to part with them. The simple fact is that we can’t put everything on the screen. If this means losing someone’s favorite character, so be it. Whether it’s a novel or a short story, a true-crime tale or 70 years’ worth of comic books, the first job is distillation. In another Wall Street Journal “Word Craft” article, the team wrote:Īdapting an existing work for film is usually a process of reduction. The sentiment was echoed by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, the screenwriters of Captain America, the current Hollywood action film based on the 70-year-old comic strip character. Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - whole-heartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. The phrase is often attributed to novelist William Faulkner, but it was actually coined by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, a British writer and critic who, in his 1916 publication, On the Art of Writing, said: This winnowed my cast down to 197 characters, all bound to one another by acquaintance or one degree of separation.įoreman was tapping into a practice - well-known among professional writers - called “kill your darlings.” In fact, a community of writers in Atlanta has adopted that name for its website. I plotted the time lines of my 400 characters and identified and discarded people who, no matter how interesting their stories, had no connection to anyone else in the book. At the end of her research, Amanda Foreman realized that, even for a story as immense and complex as the Civil War, she had too much information for both writer and reader to process. ![]() Her father was Carl Foreman, on Oscar-winning screenwriter who wrote the classic The Bridge on the River Kwai. Unfortunately, most presenters then proceed to deliver that mass to their audiences as is, inflicting the dreaded effect known as MEGO, “My Eyes Glaze Over.”Īlthough Foreman is a respected scholar with a doctorate in history from Oxford University, she has storytelling in her DNA. While few presenters spend 11 years developing their stories about their businesses, they, like Foreman, have a vast mass of unwieldy material that they have to communicate to various audiences. The fruit of my 11 years of research meant that I had more than 400 characters scattered over four regions … This vast mass of material was so unwieldy that I could hardly work my way through the first day of the conflict, let alone all four years. In an article for the Wall Street Journal‘s “Word Craft” column about her creative process, Foreman provided a valuable lesson for presenters: Historian Amanda Foreman, author of the bestselling Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, has written a new book, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War. ![]()
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