Storytelling for immersive transmedia experiences.
The workshop came about through a desire to explore a collaborative writing process that would enable the project to work with a group of creatives from the local community. We wanted to know what the challenges were and how we might overcome them. Author Matt Wingett, describes his experience of Joe Reddington’s collaborative writing workshop.
Joe Reddington’s workshop on collaborative was a fascinating experience that really took the lid off how to go about getting a particular writing goal performed through a structured and strict approach to working together collaboratively – that goal being the production of a novel, from conception, through development to printing, in 5 days.
Joe
explained that in order to achieve it, specific limits and structures
had to be achieved. This meant that each person had ownership of one
character, that location and space within the book were also their
own “characters” – ie: factors that needed to be included –
and that one did not interfere with other people’s stories.
But
how could it all work? How do you get into the frame of mind to
enable that to happen. Joe started with an exercise that asked each
of us to tell the story of a secondary character in a well-known
novel as if they were the lead character. They must have an
objective, an emotional drive and a purpose. This exercise I found
really useful. I have a tendency in my writing not to round out
secondary characters, or to make them subservient to the main story.
But in this exercise, I began to see more clearly than ever before
how actually the secondary character, the villain, the foil – these
are all heroes of their own stories, in which they are operating to
their own moral and logical standards. When this exercise was over, I
could much more easily see how to develop a story between a group of
many different people.
So, we were given a task to develop a
plot based on the central ideas of, in our case, sport and Jane
Austen. Initially, we had to work out each of our characters. What I
found really interesting in this was when it came to discuss plot.
There was a general agreement to approach this with the notion that
“I want a scene in which this happens”. This was a really
useful approach, and although the story elements appeared quite
tropey, when it came to actually getting those events to fit
together, I could see that there were very particular and interesting
drives and scenarios beginning to unfold.
In all, it was a pretty joyous activity. I certainly felt I learned a lot about collaborative writing, and that it is possible to produce much more quickly with more voices, which I really wouldn’t have believed before. I also felt that the insight into the rounding of characters is something I will take with me into the future. Excellent stuff.
Dr. Joe Reddington is the designer of the White Water Writers process. He manages the day-to-day operation of the project. White Water Writers enables groups of up to ten writers to write and publish their own novel within five days. Writers are given an idea for a story on a single side of A4. They take the idea, develop it, draft it, proof it, refine it and polish it. After four and a half days – they publish it.