There is a wonderful book called The Profession of the Stage Director, by Georgi Tovstonogov, who writes that a director may fall into one of the deepest pits by rushing immediately to visual or pictorial solutions.
This statement influenced and aided me greatly in my career as a stage director; and, subsequently, in my work as a screenwriter. If one understands what the scene means, and stages that, Mr. Tovstonogov was saying, one will be doing one’s job for both the author and the viewer. If one rushes, first, into a pretty, or pictorial, or even descriptive staging, one may be hard-pressed to integrate that staging into the logical progression of the play. And, further, while so hard-pressed, one while undoubtedly become wedded to its eventual inclusion, to the detriment of the piece as a whole.
This concept as also stated by Hemingway as, “Write the story, take out all the good lines, and see if it still works.”
My experience as a director, and as a dramatist, is this: the piece is moving in proposition to how much the author can leave out.
A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains. What is the story? The story is the essential progression of incidents that occur to the hero in pursuit of his one goal.
The point, as Aristotle told us, is what happens to the hero … not what happens to the writer.
