The Benefits of--and Confusion About--Overwriting

As a journalist, I try to write concisely. When I write creatively--fiction or extended nonfiction--I try to write more than is needed. I can then pare down, deciding what, if anything, is more important than something else, or rewrite, folding some of what I have into something else.

When I' described this to someone recently, it struck her as odd, as if the waist size of a fictional character's pants is always irrelevant. It's important to know as much as you can about your characters in writing fiction and as much as you can about the people and events in writing nonfiction. But that might be more than the audience needs to know, so you, or others, may edit. Or not.

I've always felt that it's easier to cut down than it is to build up.

I remember two moviemaking stories about overwriting. One is about William Saroyan, who in the late 1930s was a very famous playwright and short story writer. But after The Time of Your Life won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the New York Critics Award in 1939, his next few plays were not well received and he accepted an offer from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the premiere Hollywood studio, to write and direct a movie.

Saroyan produced a screenplay in narrative form about the effects of the war on a small town that estimates were would end up as a five-hour film. A shocked Louis B. Mayer fired Saroyan and had one of his contract writers, Howard Estabrook, rework the screenplay. A miffed Saroyan took his narrative script, titled The Human Comedy, and published it as a novel, which became a best seller. It came out just before the movie, which caused some people to think that the movie was based on the novel. When the movie came out, it too was a hit and ultimately won Saroyan the Academy Award for best original story.

 Saroyan deserved all of the credit he received and more. If you see the movie and read the novel, there is nothing in the movie that is not in the novel. Estabrook didn’t create anything, he simply edited the narrative down. Mayer just didn’t understand. But Saroyan was able to get two bangs for his buck—novel and screenplay.

 In a similar situation, the screenwriter, novelist, and film critic James Agee wrote the scripts for at least two great films—the African Queen, directed by John Huston, in 1951, and the Night of the Hunter, directed by Charles Laughton, in 1955. After Agee died in 1957 and Laughton in 1962, Robert Mitchum, who had starred in Hunter, repeated the story Laughton rold him—that Agree had delivered a massive, 293-page screenplay that was unfilmable and Laughton had to completely rework it.

 This story persisted until a film scholar uncovered Agee’s draft of the screenplay in 2004 and found that there was nothing in the finished film that was not in Agee’s script. For the benefit of the actors and director, Agee had provided a great deal of background about the characters.  For instance, for a young girl who watches a boat pass by, he gave her whole backstory and interior thoughts. It was never meant to be filmed. Hunter was Laughton’s first film, and he was nervous and overreacted to the sheer size of Agee’s script.

 I guess it is a good idea to tell people that you have overwritten and why.