We’ve learned an interesting lesson in the last week. We came away from our last planning session with a firm idea of what we would do next. We’d plotted how things would go for Clovenhoof during each month of our timeline. We’d decided on a theme for each of these chapters, so we each took half of them. We would write a one-line summary of the plot for that piece, and then expand that into a three act structure, summarising each scene.
What actually happened was that we came up with the one-liners; we knew what was required from each chapter. Instead of going straight to plotting the detail though, we found that we were jotting down ideas. After a couple of days of doing this, we looked at each others’ ideas and decided that we would continue to do this, and put ideas into each others’ documents as well. Dropbox makes this very easy.
Then Iain put all of the ideas into a spreadsheet, so that we could each allocate scores for the ideas, looking at what we thought would be funny, fitting, and of course writeable.
This gave us the ideas we definitely wanted to use (GOLD) those we would drop (DROSS) and those we needed to talk about, if our scores differed greatly.
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| How we scored our ideas for the “Rock and Roll” chapter |
You can see the results for chapter four, which is all about Clovenhoof’s brief rock and roll career.
Having voted, and discussed them briefly on the phone, we had the ideas that we wanted.
What comes next? We’ve each chosen a chapter to plot, scene by scene, and then we’ll swap and write the chapter. We know we’ll have some work to do after that, matching styles and details.
Maybe.
We changed tack once, we can do it again. It’s all about learning and adapting.
