Tonight, I am taking a night off from the screenplay (and the other play, and rehearsal, and the OTHER play, but mostly the screenplay). Why?
So that I can spend the evening with my writing partner Amy Clare Tasker, with whom I am drafting a nascent work about Helen of Troy. We have had a few months of workshops, off and on, where we will write together, or bring in actors for an afternoon to test things out. Right now we are in a generative phase of the project, creating new material.
The two of us are using a joint private blog as a way to organize the fragments of our writing. We draft separately throughout the week, tagging each new post by theme, content, and tone. Then when we meet on Monday night, one thing we talk about is the descriptive tags and categories we are using on the blog; it is like a side door into a conversation about what the major tropes are, and a way to track those elements organically as they emerge.
Here is a peek at the tag cloud right now:
And here is Amy, in the middle of trying to make sense of it all on my kitchen whiteboard:
Lots of big ideas. We totally earned the pizza we just ate.
Xoxo -Megan