At the moment, I’m working on a collaborative script with two other women writers from Dorset, so I thought I’d share what works for us in this writing life. Members of Pens Around the World have enjoyed success in shared writing projects which work rather like a game of consequences where one writer starts the story and others contribute in turn to complete the narrative. My Dorset group (known as 3-She) have a different approach where we generate shared ideas in a joint writing session to develop a script rather than a story and we construct the piece from beginning to end together. We do this by using a WhatsApp group call to connect while sitting at our desks in different locations. We note down ideas using the script writing platform WritersDuet so that we can all see the same screen and the developing writing (although a shared Google document would work too). One of us is nominated to do the typing and then we start getting suggestions down on the page. It’s good to bounce ideas off each other (as Adrian Tennant suggested in his recent guest post Writing – A way of life). We throw different scenarios around until we find something that resonates with all of us . The next stage is to begin the drafting process. Sometimes, we take on different roles and try a little improv to get a feel for the characters and how they interact. It seems that in aiming to write something funny, several contributors make it easier to get comedy written. We also go by the rule of thumb, that if we find it funny, others may too.
We’ve been writing together for ten years and have had short plays and comedy sketches performed at arts centres and festivals across the county. We’ve come together this summer to prepare a piece for submission into The Scripts the Thing, an annual celebration of writing for performance which is staged at venues across my home town of Dorchester. Our plays have frequently given voice to the inanimate such as in Big Heads where the Moa on Easter Island express their disgust at cruise ship visitors who trample over the tiny, remote island. This year we’re going to shine a light on the technical language used in construction by applying it in a totally different context. Let’s hope it brings a few laughs.
Cool!!