We hope the story of Stella and Will helps to bring awareness to this disease and, one day, a cure.
Hi! Mikki here. I’m so excited that Goodreads has asked us to annotate FIVE FEET APART. I could talk about this story for hours; how it was crafted, how the characters were created, how it went from script to film, then to book, and all the steps between that got us there… and now here. It all started with a phone call from Justin Baldoni.
Claire Wineland was a good friend of his. Claire was the inspiration for this whole story, based on a conversation she and Justin had about love and how the last person she could ever fall in love with was another CFer, because they would never be able to touch each other - that’s a rough paraphrase of what Justin told us.
Cut to: Justin had gotten his hands on a script of mine. The script had a particular feel and tone, and Justin wanted to talk to me and my writing partner, Tobias, about writing a movie set in a hospital about two kids who had Cystic Fibrosis. He wanted this movie to have the same tone and feel that he’d read in my earlier work. Justin would produce and direct the movie, and he was looking for writers who could give him a fully fleshed out, living, breathing story. Ideas instantly raced through my mind; ideas for a doomed Romeo & Juliet romance for modern audiences. I immediately knew how I would write the characters and how they would move through the world. This kind of love story is my favorite kind to write: destined yet impossible.
At the time, Tobias and I were finishing up a script we’d been hired to write for New Line Cinema. It was a franchise horror movie. Tobias had taken the lead on that script, as horror is very much in his genre-wheelhouse. But this… this love story… oh, boy, this one was mine. Tobias was only too happy that I took the reins.
And that is the quick little origin story for what would become the screenplay, and then the book, FIVE FEET APART.
Check out Rachael Lippincott's Kindle Notes and Highlights for FIVE FEET APART here: https://www.goodreads.com/notes/54508711-five-feet-apart/47771376-rachael-lippincott
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