Co-Write With Yourself
How you can multiply your creativity by working like a team.
People ask me how we co-write TV episodes in Turkey.
Writing as a team has some obvious difficulties. But when it is a good fit, the synergy is amazing. You don’t just add the creativity; you multiply it.
We were four writers in my writing team. We didn’t have a hierarchy, which could be a blessing and a curse. Sometimes our meetings dragged on and on, and it would take ages to agree on a storyline. But we wanted each writer to feel right about the scenes. Otherwise, it would be challenging to write them later.
At the story meeting, we would develop each storyline and list the scenes of the episode. Then each person would take a section to expand to a full treatment, which is like a screenplay without dialogue.
Once finished, we would split the treatment to write the dialogue. We would allocate the scenes to different people, not the original writer who wrote the treatment.
Sitting down to write the actual screenplay would always be an exciting moment. Even though I would know the overall story, each scene’s details would be new to me. The scenes written by my friends would be full of brilliant ideas. However, we couldn’t just add dialogue and be done with it. We were supposed…