As you may know, Jelly Trumpet is a side hustle. We all have full-time jobs. My business is a digital marketing consultancy, Mr. B is a developer and our voice talent Ms Claire is a copywriter.
Writing the Drafts
I write at weekends mainly, Saturday morning is the best time, relaxed and full of coffee. I wanted to progress Jelly Trumpet from a collection of surreal ‘banter sketches’ and creativity tips to episodes with a story.
Currently, we are on draft eight. For those of you who write you may be interested in how many hours goes into the writing of each episode. The answer is between nine and thirteen hours.
How an Episode Starts
It’s usually one idea and that idea is usually a blend. The blend is a time and a place with an unusual variation. The variation is putting my alter ego ‘Jim the Writer’, a compulsive experimenter, Mr. B and the Queen of the Aquitaine into a place they don’t want to be, the classic ‘fish out of water’ scenario.
I used to plan all my writing to the nth degree. Scenes are plotted, an ending decided and characters with a backstory let loose. I enjoyed writing this way for competitions and speculative scripts. But when it came to Jelly Trumpet I decided to just write.
An idea with energy is all I needed and most of these came from a genre ‘clue’ or a ‘what if?’ Sometimes both eg ‘Podcast Noir’ is episode 3 and this is because of my love of film noir and the wonder ‘what if there was such a thing as a “cliché cannon?”
How the Episode Drafts Happened
Just getting to the end is the aim. I have an idea for an opening scene which is the prequel to everything going wrong (usually because of Mr b and his experiments). There is also a long-term joke that pays off in the last episode (an idea from Mr. B).
Just get to the end is what I tell myself. Sometimes I find myself wondering how I get out of the situation I’ve created. That’s fun and also a pain because it means working at an idea, worrying it like a bone’ till I get to the marrow.
First Draft done, I can relax and read the story, which I concentrate on first. Next will be a draft looking at characters and dialogue.
Subsequent drafts are made looking at the whole and if the episode makes me laugh.
Recording Rehearsal
We’ve had one rehearsal on Zoom and another is on the way. We want to make sure we are practised and extracting as much as possible for your listening pleasure.
We hope to start recording properly in October.
Take care,
About Jelly Trumpet
Jelly Trumpet is the ‘World’s only comedy podcast about creativity.’Listen to the struggles of Jim, a struggling writer and Mr b, a musician, as they attempt to put a podcast together. Jelly Trumpet is full of tools and tips and really is a useful and insightful podcast about creativity. Give it a go eh?
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