One of the great enchantments of literature is a captivating narrator. Most of our favorite works have indelible voices and scenes. For those of us who write fiction and memoir, adapting stories to film and television seems like a natural transition. However, our skills can both help and work against us. We forget that scripts are meant to be collaborative, that we are limited by what can be seen and heard.
In this workshop, we'll examine several successful adaptations to see how writers and directors reinvent story, rather than merely translate. How do we externalize what is internal and leave space for actors and crew to work their magic? Whether you're adapting your own work or simply want to understand how stories transform across mediums, you'll leave with tools for rendering interiority through exterior action.
RACHEL SWEARINGEN is the author of the story collection How to Walk on Water and Other Stories, which received the New American Press Fiction Prize and was named the 2021 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year. In recent years, her work has expanded into film and visual forms. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Electric Lit, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Off Assignment, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Berlin Writing Prize, the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction. She lives in Chicago and teaches for the graduate writing program at Northwestern University in the School of Professional Studies.
