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20 May 2023

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This week’s session of Writing for Stage began with a total freewrite – ‘whatever spills out of your head’ – for five minutes.

Next, we chose an interesting phrase that came up in the writing, and wrote using that alone as our prompt for three more minutes.

An ‘offbeat’ section on Sky News features strange headlines in the news this week. We were asked to pick one that could inspire a scene. Our options included:

  • Father of at least 550 children banned from donating any more sperm
  • Chicken escapes subway workers
  • Man caught smuggling scissors in 'peculiar location' of his body
  • Speeding driver tried to switch places with his dog to avoid arrest

Once we had come up with an idea, we had 10 minutes to draft a scene inspired by the article we’d chosen.

Taking our scene, we were asked to mash up two genres and pitch the blurb for a full-length play. Potential genre mash-ups include:

  • Thriller - Fantasy
  • Romance - Horror
  • Comedy - Adventure
  • Mystery - Sci-fi

Amelia’s buddy movie, beginning with a dog being blamed for risky driving, follows a man and a dog’s journey across America. Katie’s blockbuster is broken into five acts, beginning with characters planning a heist which ends up going wrong, developing to a point where the perpetrators not only hand themselves in to police, but fall in love with one another!

Writing for Stage returns next week.


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