Once you and your partner agree that the outline is done, you are ready to write. In my most recent collaboration the outline took six months of meeting once or twice a week and working out our characters and what would happen in the screenplay. After we worked out the climax and added a few ideas to the end of the second act, I said, “Let’s each write 5 scenes per week, you take odds, I’ll write evens, and we’ll be done in 7 weeks.” No matter how busy we were during the week, there was always time to write a scene. Sometimes she was ahead and I was behind, then I’d catch up and she’d get stuck, but it evened out and we were done in less than two months. This was during the winter, when we were both busy with our lives and jobs, so we just cranked out the first draft.
It was rough, but it was done quickly and we had something on paper that we could read and respond to and work with.
In my first partnership, I spent one day dividing up the beats between us. I tried to give my partner the beats that she came up with and liked the most and I kept my favorites. I made sure that of the seventy beats we were each responsible for thirty-five. Sometimes there are two beats in a scene and since this is a beat outline not a scene outline, those two beats would go together. By the time we started writing, my partner had landed a job as a writing assistant on a TV Show, so our face-to-face meetings were limited to the weekends. I took on the responsibility of maintaining the final draft copy of our screenplay with the all the corrected scenes and would make sure to email it to her before our meetings. We would each write at least two scenes during the day then email them to each other. In the evening we would rewrite each other’s scenes and send them back. Then on the weekends, we would sit at her dining room table with our laptops open and go through every scene, every word, every murder, until we both agreed that it worked. The first draft took about a month and a half, thirty-five writing days plus weekend meeting days.