The writing of a musical?

3 days ago Ashley Godfrey-Keyte and Peter Cammish finally finished the project they had been working on for over a year, The tales of Flufferwump The Musical. But how did 2 teachers (one former and one current) write a musical and how could I do the same? Well read on and I will tell you.

It all started when my son (the title character of Zig Zag) asked for me to create a bed time story for him. My mind went blank and was then filled with this picture of a triangle with a toothy grin and eyes in his hands, getting excited and clapping, causing him to get black eyes and of course much laughter from my son. He kept asking for stories and I kept making up more and more ridiculous situations where a character with eyes in his hands would do something stupid!

Meanwhile Ash was getting really frustrated with teaching music (well all the other stuff that comes with teaching anyway) and was looking for a project to do. We play in a band together and are food friends so we decided that a musical we should write, but the first idea was about a teacher going insane (I still like it so may have to write that one in the future as well), however we could never truley settle on this working.

Eventually I decided to start writing down some of the Flufferwump stories (See these blogs to discover the stories I wrote) and sent them to Ash. He read them to his daughter who also giggled lots and it was decided there and then to write a musical about this story.

Now that you have the backstory how did we turn it into a muscial?

1) Write a short story or pick a story

I wrote the FLufferwump story first. This helped us when discussing what should happen, what scenes we should have and how the script should flow

2) Download a script writing tool

We used Final Draft in the end as this made editing the script and making it look good easy

3) Meet regularly and enjoy it

Ash and I met fairly regularly over the year it took to write often over a take away curry (We always had the best ideas after a curry, especially as one of the characters is known for his farts). This enabled us to share ideas and keep each other on the right path.

4) Story board

Ash and I used some of our early sessions to Story Board the play so we knew where things fit in place and where some songs might fit. We used post it notes as this enabled us to move bits around easily, although final draft does have a version of this

5) Write the ideas, edit and worry later

Both Ash and I prefered to write in an organic way. Ash often phoned me saying “I had an idea for a song which woke me up at 3 this morning. What do you think?” and invariably it was again absolute gold. My favourite of these was I’m taking over your world!. I was not expecting that! I did similar with the script jumping about a loittle bit between scenes and acts when I got a good idea, then editing to make it sensible.

6) Do your research

By this I mean research other musicals, how the songs work and even how to copyright and publish your work. Ash did most of this for us and did a brilliant job, meaning we are both now apparantly ASCAPs (which has caused no end of hilarity).

7) Have fun

For us this project was about having fun and producing something that we feel will be fun to perform in and fun to watch.

Nothing however beats just getting started, so with that in mind…… Off you go!