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Now, in his next book,Young Radicals, McCarter takes revolutionary figures as his subjects once again.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How did the idea for this book come to you?
Credit: Kristen Norman
Then the worst war in history wrecked those hopes, and a lot more besides.
The irony of that reversal haunted me for years.
How would it feel to live through that kind of shock?
I picked those five because I thought they evoked their era and had some special resonance in ours.
Lately, theyve turned out to be more resonant than I expected.
The militant suffragist Alice Paul led an enormous march for womens rights in Washington.
the Hamiltome) together.
We had to knock it out in a crazy couple months in 2015.
But that hiatus turned out to be a lucky bit of cross-training for my storytelling muscles.
I wanted theHamiltonbook to trace the shows creation by following the same narrative arc as the show itself.
That would only work if Lins songs alternated with my profiles, essays, etc.
And thenthe ultimate test of a storytelling puzzleall traces of the puzzle pieces need to disappear.
You dont want readers to think about your storytelling moves.
Spoiler: It did not feel good.
Thats not how this works.
America only gets to have one Alice Paul, and we already had her.
We have to learn from what she did.
We have to be fearless, resourceful, and self-sacrificing, as she was.
But the point is to gobeyondwhat she did.
The point is to dobetterthan they did.
