by Steve Kaire

Working with a writing partner can either reduce your workload by half or create twice the headaches.

Any kind of partnership is fraught with peril. If it fails, not only does the project come to an immediate end, but your friendship may be over as well.

A well chosen partner is a valuable lightning rod to create and bounce ideas off. That person’s strengths can balance your weaknesses. There has to be a meeting of the minds on critical issues before a partnership is undertaken.

Your friendship may be over as well.

There’s a list of questions that have to be answered before both parties make the final commitment to work together:

– Do your writing styles mesh rather than conflict?
– Do you have personalities that work well together under pressure?
– Can you both invest the amount of time required from inception of the script to the ultimate marketing of the material?
– How will major disagreements be resolved when you reach an impasse?
– Will you be doing an equal amount of work and splitting the money equally or will there be some other kind of financial split?
– And if you do go your separate ways at any point, who does the material belong to?

All these questions and potential pitfalls should be discussed and agreed to in a written contract form before any partnership is entered into.

– Steve Kaire

Steve Kaire is a Screenwriter/Pitchman who’s sold 8 projects to the major studios without representation. The last project he sold, he’s Co-Producing for Walden Media. A screenwriter for over 30 years, he holds a Masters in Dramatic Writing and has taught writing classes at the American Film Institute.

Steve was featured on the Tonight Show’s, “Pitching to America” and was voted a Star Speaker at Screenwriters Expo three years in a row. His top rated CD, “High Concept – How to Create, Pitch & Sell to Hollywood” is a best seller. You can find his website here.

Jamie Campbell

Jamie Campbell is an author, screenwriter, and television addict.

Jamie is proud to be an Editor for The Story Department.

Her latest series Project Integrate is out now.

jamiecampbell.com.au

by Marie Setiawan

This week I was invited to the screening of a feature that I had the privilege of being a part of from its very foundations. Looking back at its long and arduous journey in the making, I thought back to when I started to walk in the footsteps of a screenwriter. It all began in a filmmaking workshop held by Information and Cultural Exchange in 2010 where I was introduced to Billy Marshall Stoneking – our mentor in screenwriting – and seven budding filmmakers (whether we were writers or directors). From the very get-go, we’ve established our little writer’s circle and collaboration began to create seven different short films, all from different points-of-view, different walks of life, and creative differences. This was my first collaborative experience, where building the foundations of your story, plot, and characters became both rewarding and difficult.

The Art of Collaborating and its Rewards (or Tribulations)

Many writers keep their babies close to their heart, but only few would keep it away from the feedback it deserves. Why deny the potential of your story? Following Billy’s thought on screenwriting, your story becomes a part of you – almost a treasure. And with that comes a subconscious thought (or an awareness) to protect it and shield it from the eyes of others. Personally, collaboration opens you up to a number of opportunities to see how your story fares from another point-of-view. Personally, a lack of collaboration can be seen as a fear that another’s eyes would tear it apart and shred what work you’ve already put into it. Stories that need layers to shed eventually get placed on the shelf to collect dust, for those who can’t continue on. But the beauty of shedding these layers is bringing the story back down to its very core – the truth behind all the junk that shrouds it.

Working and sharing ideas with other fellow writers is a wonderful yet trying experience. The past few years stepping into screenwriting has taught me that. And with that, there are three advantages I’ve found that outweigh the criticism of others when it comes to storytelling and scriptwriting within a collaboration.

1. Reacting to the Read
Waiting for a fellow writer while they read your script? Watch them every now and then to find any initial reactions they may have while they are reading. I’ve found it easier to discover (or roughly estimate) at what points of my story they had the urge to crack a smile, pull a frown, or even chuckle (whether for good or bad). At first, I felt self-conscious of what others thought of any of my creative choices. Now I embrace the thought that I was able to move them in one way or another.

2. Listening to the Initial Thought
When any collaborator/writer/editor/family member gives feedback, it can be a daunting thing. Did they understand your story? Or are they still unsure as to what is going on? Their first thoughts to your story are the most important pieces of feedback you’d get from them. The initial thought and their first impressions tell you, as the writer, what they got from your story, making them your first point of contact as the audience. By listening and processing the first things that come out of their mouths, it can help you understand what aspects of your story they’ve gotten the most of – whether that is on a visual perspective, or a storytelling aspect.

3. Creating a Dialogue
After the read and the first load of feedback, creating and sharing thoughts between yourself and your “audience” at this stage can help create an understanding about your story. It isn’t all about enforcing your vision, but creating the bridge that can help make them understand your point-of-view. I’ll admit there had been times where I would try to make others understand where my stories came from – not to the greatest extent either. It’s all about sharing your thoughts and being open to receive feedback and their point-of-views as well.

These are just small things I’ve made clear to myself when I share, but it has helped me take that next step into screenwriting when I can freely let my stories go into another’s hands and not be paranoid about finding and discovering the core of my story – to shed away layers to find something new.

The Product of Collaboration – The Fruits of Labour

Now, almost a year later in the works (two years after the shorts had premiered), a feature appears. Due to the writer’s circle and collaborating with six others, we’ve all discovered a common theme that strings all of our films together into a cohesive piece. With that, the prospects of a feature built on the very foundations of these short films was a possibility. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but working with others, whether it is in the writing stages, the production stages, and even through to post, collaboration is key.

So, why elephants?

– Marie Setiawan

Marie Setiawan is a film graduate from the International Film School Sydney, as well as a UNSW Alumni with a BA degree in Media and Communications with Honours. Writing is her passion, but she also enjoys many things on the side such as reading, watching films, and is an avid gamer of sorts.

She also tweets for The Story Department with a small crew.

by Jamie Wynen

… a brooding, frustrated figure sitting at their desk, striking furiously at the keys of a typewriter before snatching the page out, crumpling it up and casting it into a nearby bin – already piled high with dozens of rejected first pages. If it’s shot and lit in noir style, the writer will probably take a slug of bourbon at this point.

The Lone Writer

Eager to replicate the success of Hunter S Thompson and Stephen King, this was my favoured writing style during uni. I wasted lots of paper, ink and sleep (and bourbon). As with the stereotype, I didn’t make much progress with writing my vision of the Great Australian Screenplay. Instead, I tended to lose my focus, dither uncontrollably, and give up.

This lack of output confused me – during high school, I wrote nearly every day. My bookcase was infested with battered notebooks, each fat and distended with smudged blue ink. I tended to start writing around nine or ten pm and continue late into the night, often putting down my pen at one or two am. This, coincidentally, set in motion an abysmal sleep cycle that would come to haunt me in adult life – where the expectation is that you’re already at work by 10am, not groggily crawling out of bed in desperate need of a cup of tea.

During high school, I wrote nearly every day.
My bookcase was infested with battered notebooks,
each fat and distended with smudged blue ink.

Along with an enforced change to my sleep habits, adulthood drastically lessened the time I devoted to writing, although not the time I spent thinking about stories. Ideas jotted in a notebook, once the seeds of a larger story or script, remained frozen in an embryonic state until they went stale. Despite calling myself a student of writing, the time I actually spent writing stories had atrophied to a fatal extent.

A new approach was needed.

Experiments in Collaboration

No matter how much the conversation meandered, it always came back to the story at hand.

The opportunity was dropped in my lap when I worked on a short film with a school friend. He eagerly told me about a TV show premise he had in mind. A few weeks later, we met at a café to sit down and see if we could write a pilot together.

I soon discovered a prodigious advantage to collaborative writing: time set aside for writing was actually spent writing.

A disclaimer: my natural attention span is that of a nine year old with ADHD experiencing a sugar rush at Disney Land. Added to which, my near-constant access to that wondrous Pez Dispenser of procrastination we call the Internet does my concentration no favours. I sometimes wonder how I manage to even clothe myself, let alone achieve anything.

But I discovered that by sitting down with a co-writer to discuss a story idea and its characters – and all the terrible things that I foresaw happening to them – the process of brainstorming, selecting, building and articulating a script was no longer a struggle against inertia. Instead, the process became more organic, conversational, and focused. No matter how much the conversation meandered, it always came back to the story at hand.

Internet does my concentration no favours. I sometimes wonder
how I manage to even clothe myself, let alone achieve anything.

I found that this allowed me to be more experimental – by suggesting more risky and original thoughts and gauging my writing partner’s response, I was able to entertain and discriminate between a much wider selection of ideas. If I were puzzling over it alone, I’d be wondering if it was clever, cliché, or just plain stupid.

I was also able to borrow from my partners’ life experiences – having lived completely different lives, I was thrilled at the discovery of common observations, and it was these shared conclusions that would become the underpinnings for theme and character.

Our TV series is steadily gaining momentum. We’ve written several thirty-minute scripts, built a story arc and series bible, and begun our third draft of the pilot script. My creative partnerships with other writers have produced another three short film scripts over the course of the last two months. By contrast, in the last six months I’ve written only two short film scripts alone.

Solo Writing

Importantly, collaboration hasn’t replaced my solo writing.

What of the solo approach? Other writers seem to reject the notion of sharing creative control. One told me that he can only work alone – preferring to have a monopoly over the dialogue between only himself and the page. For him, collaboration occurs later, when a completed first draft is ready to be critiqued. I don’t feel that this approach is invalid or wrong – on the contrary, I think the right approach is the one that helps you write a script.

Importantly, collaboration hasn’t replaced my own solo writing. Understanding the essence of the script, I’ve always found, is the hardest part. The success of writing doesn’t lie in how many pages I can pump out per day – instead, the key to my creative writing rests with my ability to conceptualise an entire world inside my head.

Understanding the essence of the script,
I’ve always found, is the hardest part.

The time spent writing with partners frequently involves actually typing out the scripts, but the true value lies in exploring what the story is really about, the building and layering of complex and interesting characters, and finding creative ways to bypass cliche.

Once this world has been built, explored and understood, it becomes liberatingly straightforward to put this world to the page on my own – during time I might have otherwise spent googling Advice Animal memes.

– Jamie Wynen

Jamie is a UTS Writing Graduate who took one look at the real world and went straight back to uni for a Masters, this time in Media Production. He has interests and experience across a number of fields, including writing, photography, cinematography, and Youtube connoisseur.

Jamie looks after the video content and writes guest articles for The Story Department. When everybody else has gone home for the night, Jamie will sit at Karel’s desk, put his feet up and pretend that he runs the place.