Skype and Collaborative Writing

Yesterday's consultation with Ivory took place upstairs in Cafe Nero. We laid out a hard copy of the White Angel 2 treatment and the beginning of the screenplay and started talking through the scenes.

I love this part of the process - when you begin to explore scenes in detail. Up until that point the scenes have been a sequence of necessary events, taking the character from opening stasis, through to final resolution. But when you begin to unpack them - that is when the real texture of character and story start to be revealed. Most of us tend to start out with characters and situations that have been 'seen before'. But as you explore them, you start to make discoveries that move the story into fresh ground.

Unfortunately our meeting was sandwiched between other meetings, so we ended up with less than an hour before having to rush off. The deal was that we'd meet up again today. Somewhere. A pub in Great Glen, perhaps? It was all rather vague.

But today the idea came to me (duh - slap palm to forehead) that we could meet via Skype. Which is what we did. We had two and a quarter hours of excellent consultation this morning. Typing and talking and surfing the Internet for research images.

The good news is, it worked really well. This approach is going to enable us to grab an hour here and an hour there through the week, even though we live in different towns. We could live on different continents and it would still be do-able. I feel as if I am belatedly stepping into the modern world.



However, in a few hours, I'm heading back in time to an ancient manor house in the Cotswolds. It will be a weekend of writing workshops and the company of creative people. If I can't get an Internet connection, there will be a few days of silence before I can post again. Otherwise I'll try my best to share the experience.

I'm SO lookign forward to it.