Screenplay by Skype

Accidental Co-Writers

“Remember what Bilbo used to say: It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step on to the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings.

A fresh screenwriting adventure has started and I didn’t even step out the door. All I did was fire up my computer and get on to Skype.

Last week, I was chatting with Caz Adams, a multi-talented screenwriter-actress-director friend from Australia, who had given me feedback on a pitch. She asked me if I could look over one of her storylines. Before long we were exchanging notes and quite kicked about how we both had similar ideas. Maybe we should talk about writing a rom-com?

Now that’s the inciting incident to this story. And guess what, I decided to break the rule by not refusing the call to adventure.

Within minutes, Caz and I were off to a flying start on our co-writing adventure. All on Skype.

Both of us agreed it had to be a rom-com and/or family comedy in a East-meets-West, Bollywood-goes-to-Hollywood style. Ideas about the premise, characters, locations and scenes were flying thick and fast. And this despite Caz working on four other synopses, and being offered a feature film screenwriting gig the same week. As for me, I was working on a synopsis, besides attending to my day job which involves research assignments. I decided to go with the flow and believe me, it was more like being swept away on a tsunami-like wave of ideas. We were bouncing ideas off each other, extrapolating on scenes and situations and…just having an enormous amount of fun.

I was researching locations and Skyping and both of us would work at putting together a structure or developing situations and characters based on our Skype chats. Within a week since we started Skype-ing, we had worked out a bare bones structure for our story. And then the question popped: how about taking the script to ScriptFrenzy? Yeah, why not?

Bilbo was both wrong and right. Sometimes you don’t have to step out your door for that adventure. But yes, once you’re on that road, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off. Oh yes, it can be a bit dangerous too. Like Caz says, we were going so fast, our brains were hurting! But hey, what’s a little danger when you’re on an exciting journey?

Stay tuned for more about this Co-Writing Adventure.