Partnerships

Took a detour from working on this play.  And from reading Seven Days in the Art World or watching food documentaries for other projects.  I went over to my best friend Alanna’s house yesterday to bang out some sketches for a sketch project we’re trying to work on together.  I have never wanted to work with a writing partner.  I never resisted it because I never thought about it.  I just thought it was the dumbest thing in the world.  For me.

My theory is that the way you start writing is the way that works.  I know college roommates who started writing together and are now very successful TV comedy writers.  I started writing by myself.  I read lots of comic books as a kid.  I was a huge Marvel comics guy.  My cousin Leighton, who is a few years older than me, was a comic book fanatic.  So I got exposed to comics through him.  I remember reading the X Men Dark Phoenix saga because of him.  Then I got into the Fantastic Four and Alpha Flight and the Teen Titans.  I would walk to the corner store where they sold comic books and read them for hours.  That’s what sparked my imagination.  So when I was in the seventh grade and our school teacher asked us to start writing short stories, I started writing about these comic book characters.  Everything they did just captured my imagination.  Then I was writing little novellas and short stories in high school. 

Most recently, I started talking to Alanna who has been my best friend since childhood about working on something together. We were just chatting about growing up in the 80s and the things we used to watch on TV.  It was interesting to both of us that we lived in an era where so much wasn’t talked about.  Political correctness was finding its way into the public consciousness.  You had TV sitcoms doing episodes on serious subjects that far outreached the writers ability and sensitivity.  And yet, in addition to the Catholic church, this is how fiction became such a clear influence on me.  These fictions shaped my world view.  And somehow I wanted to make a comment on that.  We thought about Portlandia.  We talked about Square Pegs, an incredibly smart show that we watched as kids and loved.  We were too smart for our own good.  We were precocious kids.  So we wanted to write about our memory of looking back at that time, with some self awareness that has been gained over the past several years.  But we wanted to do it in sketch form, so we could tell a few stories per episode. 

The idea is to film four or five sketches for a sizzle reel that we want to take out and try to shop.  I had never thought that I would want to write with anyone.  The suggestion has been made recently, but I feel like that takes a lot of chemistry and I don’t have chemistry like that with just anyone.  Except for my best friend since childhood. 

So I came over and we sat down across from each other.  I’m very disciplined when I write.  I want to sit down and get to it right away.  I don’t like to waste time.  So we just start talking and we come up with a sketch that isn’t even on our list of sketch ideas.  Alanna stands up and starts talking in the voice of a character.  Then she goes back and repeats the line, refining it every time.  But she’s also repeating it to make sure that I’ve got it as I’m transcribing.  But I’m also rewriting.  And as she’s thinking of the next thing to say, I’m on a riff.  And before she can open her mouth, I chime in with “what I’ve got.”  And we’re off to the races.  Our references are the same.  We find the same things funny, but here’s why I think it works: she can just get up and start talking.  She’s fearless.  I need to get warmed up a bit and I like having control of the keyboard, so I can begin to structure the jokes and the rhythm of the scene.

Now it makes me want to write more with her.  And it makes me want to get her take on the pilots I’m working on and to do a little of the same sort of work on my scripts.  So who knows…this writing partner thing might just work out.