How We Collaborate on a Screenplay posted by Martin

Mr. Beeson and I are working on a screenplay to enter in the Nicholl Fellowship this year. When I tell people that I’m collaborating on a script they often are curious about the process and how it works, so I thought I’d talk about just how we do it.

The script we’re working on is titled “Stray.” Old timey Spitball! readers will recognize it as one of the fifty prison planet plot ideas (first presented here, inspired by the Shannon Wright song Black Little Stray). We’ve been honing the story and exploring it for nearly two years now, including Mr. Beeson writing a prose adaptation for the 2007 NaNoWriMo.

Deciding to enter the Nicholl Fellowship competition, we had a pretty solid first act, lots of character story and an idea of what the end-goal is, but very little of the action and connecting tissue. We spent a number of weeks having story sessions where we would hash out exactly what the story is.

For us, this means spitballing. We get together every week, sit in a room and go over story ideas in as much detail as possible. We talk about what we like, what we’ve been focusing on, and we find scabs that need picking. We present problems and try to solve them. This is done entirely verbally (Spitball! endorses the Socratic Method^tm) and then we write down the salient points for institutional memory.

In this case, the story took shape into four acts: the first establishes the norm on a prison planet. The second introduces the Stray character and the complications therein. The third is some prisoners disturbing the status quo, and the fourth which is a final quest and resolution.

Those notes would be turned, mostly by Mr. Beeson, into fifty or so ideas for scenes that could happen during the act, and that propel the characters towards the larger goals we arranged for them.

From that list, posted on our Basecamp account, we wrote it out in prose, what we call our “white papers.” It was four plaintext documents that we share using Dropbox (an amazing tool for collaboration). They’re terse prose versions of the story, to flesh out themes and make sure the plot, motivations and throughput are defined.

We brought those together Saturday morning at my studio, and read them out loud tip-to-stern, interrupting as we went to clarify things or point out problems. It’s a matter of refinement. That which was great a month ago now might pale and need work. We align actions between character and plot. We solve problems that have been nagging at us. Some areas were either roughed in or not quite done, but the bulk of it was there. All together, those four documents were just a bit shy of 12,000 words. Essentially, it’s a terse and insidery treatment.

The read through is mostly good natured, although occasionally we slip into a more sniping tone. This usually indicates its lunch time, which Saturday just happened to be Piroshky.

When we were relatively happy with the look of it, we broke the scenes out into an OmniOutliner Pro document broke down all the acts into scenes.

Mr. Beeson took that document and assigned the scenes to each of us. In the past we’ve had team selection sessions, like playing pickup baseball. But we wanted to write today and I was out seeing my lovely niece play a princess named Vapid in a musical last night, so Mr. Beeson kindly shouldered the responsibility and evenly divided the scenes between us.

He also added milestones to Basecamp and assigned them. The scenes are written using Final Draft (which I’d be happy to be without, but the other alternatives I’ve tried slow me down during the writing process). The Final Draft documents are named for the scene number and put into Dropbox so that it automatically backs up, creates versions with every save, and syncs our computers with the latest work.

When we have a solid first draft of the scene, we post a message in Basecamp marking the milestone as complete. The other person can then make notes in the script or in the Basecamp message.

Once the scenes are complete and we’re happy with them, we’ll assemble them into a single Final Draft document, and do many read-throughs to look for issues, typos and make sure the voice and flow is consistent.

In our experience, at this point it’s really difficult to decipher who wrote what. Our voices and humor tend to be similar. Also, it’s difficult to decipher who-came-up-with-what-idea. Sometimes I remember, but mostly they’ve been turned and worked so much that there’s a lot of both of us in every idea that makes it onto the page.

If our past experience holds, we’ll find major flaws down the road and we’ll rethink certain things. Will that be true this time? I’d like to think we’re on the right track, but a process like this can be run a million times with a million different outcomes. I suspect we’ll never really be able to stop tweaking it.

Illustration by Christine Marie Larsen

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