The Word Cloud

Very exciting week; the composer I'm writing my musical with has sent me a rough version of one of the songs. Of course it's not perfect, music goes through drafts like any writing does, but it's pretty damn good! Perhaps most importantly it is not what I would have imagined, not what I would have written (if I could write music) which means that the finished article is going to be a genuine collaboration. Regular readers will know that I don't collaborate much. And people who know me can probably guess why. One of the main problems I have had with the musical so far is letting go of the reins, I'm just not used to sharing responsibility and my instinct is to plough ahead as if I'm the only one working on it. One way I have alleviated this is bt sending regular (roughly bi-weekly) updates to the composer so she can comment and so on. And that's just as well because I'm seriously re-editing the opening scenes. Two of them have bit the dust completely, one song has gone and the scene substantially changed. And the more I change at the start of course the more needas to change later on. It's a big job, this is my first real attempt at writing something historical and I think my primary instinct was to stick religiously to what happened when and include everything. My writing instincts are now kicking in and I am turning the events more into a story (without changing the fact s of course). It's also the first time I've written something serious for the stage, on screen or in a book you have so many more editing options, half the challenge on stage is to be able to keep events natural while being forced to work within a very limited number of scenes. I think I'm doing this better now than when i started, hence the major re-think but it's still tricky. Subtleties which I would montage my way through in a film need to be addressed with intelligence, and there are days when that just doesn't feel like an option I possess. At the moment it feels like the ideas are just pouring out of me, I could probably change every single scene, and for now that's a good thing. I'm not writing yet so I just note all the ideas in the structure and see how they play out. Which of course brings me back to my collaboration problem again because keeping track of all these changes must be a complete pain in the arse. In conclusion; I'm glad I don't have to work with me.