Sometime you are wrong. Sometime so is everybody else.
I posted recently about a trip out to LA to work on some short scripts, as part of a project I’m working on at the moment. There’s not much I can say about them at this stage, but I do have the following observations about the process of writing as part of a team.
1. Give yourselves plenty of room to breathe
I’ve never been involved in a collaborative writing process before – it’s always been something that I’ve done alone. It quickly became clear that it can be quite a creatively claustrophobic process, especially in relation to a screenplay or script, where every word costs money, and needs to be driving your narrative forward.
The right adjective or adverb might make the killer line, but the wrong ones have to be ruthlessly dispensed with. As a result, everybody is zeroed in, throwing words or phrases around, and shooting the majority of each others ideas out of the sky like clay pigeons.
I guess Dane must have seen this coming, because he’d transformed the loading bay behind the PPC offices into the largest writing room you’ve ever seen (pictured below), and we ended up using the extent of it in order to periodically remove ourselves from a central creative vortex within which nothing was sacred, and nobody could be assured of holding sway.
2. Make sure you have your own screen
We had Final Draft running across three Macbooks, so that anybody could drive, and all of us could keep an eye on things. I hadn’t really thought about the alternative, but over one of our many cigarette breaks Dane talked a little about his experiences of working around the same laptop, and the merits of having a screen of one’s own became clear.
It’s one thing to be engaged in the inevitable intellectual sparring that seems to be a necessary feature of a collaborative writing process, another entirely for a full-blown fistfight to break out in the battle for control of the keyboard. Even as it was we periodically snatched the cursor away from one another with our respective trackpads, but never more than playfully.
3. Bide your time and pick your battles
Writers generally have their own ideas about how things should be said, and are generally accustomed to saying them that way unchallenged. In a collaborative scenario there will be words, phrases, sentiment and structural details you instinctively disagree with, probably in abundance.
It’s importance to learn to let the bulk of them go, unless you see your storyline branching off in a wholly unhelpful direction. Taking issue on every potentially problematic detail will quickly grind things to a halt, and drain away any creative momentum you’re collectively accumulating.
When you’re writing to a deadline your first priority is to complete your script. Once that’s done, you can worry about making it better. With the number of rewrites most scripts go through you’ll likely find that a lot of the problems you have come out in the wash, without the need to waste any of your precious individual equity by taking issue.
You’ll also find that maybe a couple of readings softens your objection, or that it disappears altogether, and you realise that your first instinct was the wrong one. It’s important to keep that basic principle in mind. SOMETIMES YOU ARE WRONG. But then, of course, never lose sight of the fact that SOMETIMES SO IS EVERYBODY ELSE.
Tags: screenplays
March 6th, 2009 at 1:34 am
[...] matter that the process of conceptualising them and co-writing the scripts was one of the most creatively stimulating experiences of my life, working or otherwise. Nor that [...]