New Musicals Network

Like many people, one of the books which stuck in my mind as a child was CS Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. I remember reading this at school one wintertime and, looking out of the window (I was lucky enough to have a window seat in the classroom) on a frosty morning I could imagine the snow-covered landscape of Narnia very vividly.

One of the things which makes this such a memorable book is its title – only a master storyteller like Lewis could take three such contrasting and disparate items as a lion, a witch and a wardrobe and weave them together into the incredibly rich and enchanting tale we all know and love.

Most composers and writers will acknowledge that the starting point for a successful musical is indeed the story itself. If we can get that right, the characters, song lyrics and music should follow. So – can we learn any lessons from Lewis and his Narnian universe?

Well, in pursuit of this, I decided to have a look at creative writing websites, rather than perhaps the more obvious route of checking out stories which have been successful musicals. An excellent story-writing website I discovered is www.creative-writing-now.com which has a wealth of ideas to get the creative juices flowing. Interestingly, the first suggestion they make is to take three contrasting items and link them together into a story – just like Lewis did in The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe!

Some of the ideas include:

A broken wristwatch, peppermints, and a hug that goes too far.

An ex-boyfriend, a pair of binoculars, and a good-luck charm

A horoscope, make-up, and a missing tooth

Another website, www.seventhsanctum.com, takes a completely different approach. This one is a kind of automatic story generator, which can yield surprisingly interesting results. You begin by selecting a genre from a dropdown menu – for example science fiction (there aren’t many science fiction musicals around, are there?) You then click “generate” and a very basic plot outline is created. Here’s one I made earlier (as they say on Blue Peter):

“This is a quest story. The story is about a watchful librarian, a professor, a quartermaster, and an introverted singer who is constantly annoying a marine. It starts on an icy planet. The critical element of the story is travel. Genetic engineering and its side effects is a major part of this story.”

Other parts of the Seventh Sanctum site contain “generators” for the component parts of your story, such as character names and traits, etc.

But is using a website such as Seventh Sanctum cheating? Surely it is merely re-assembling bits that someone else has already put together but in a different order? My view is that this is essentially what writers have always done anyway. Standard advice for budding writers since time immemorial is to keep a notebook and jot down anything which you observe which might be useful later for a story. A website tool (or indeed a creative writing textbook) simply automates this process a bit.

Of course, it requires a major leap to turn a germ of a story idea (whether it’s been generated by a website or purely within the brain of the writer) into something suitable for musical theatre. Just because a story works on the page does not necessarily mean it will be theatrical in its nature. Other factors will need to be considered – the characters, the setting, the overall pace and movement of the story to name a few – before the story can begin to take shape as a piece of music drama.