First interview with Kate and Sarah

Who are your favourite writers?

K: Too many to choose from! Gosh ok if I had to name someone quickly it would be: Novelist - Alisdair Gray, Experimental - Hélène Cixous, Theatre - Oliver Emanuel, Screen - Craig Mazin, Craft - Will Storr. Oh no I do not like my male/female ratio there. Should I change my answers? No, I’ll stick to those. 

S: Marian Keyes, Jasper Fforde, Roald Dahl and Jerome K. Jerome. Each have very different stories to tell but I love the way they tell ‘em!

Where did you two meet?

K: Our very first day at University. We sat across a table and our scared bambi eyes met in a meadow of sheer terror. We then bonded over lunch as we laughed at the size of the bag I had brought (I looked like a twelve year old on their first day of high school where their bags are so big they look like they’re going to topple over at any minute - yep that was me). Turned out we only needed a pen that day so my file, highlighters, note books, bulging pencil case and everything else I had in there (I can’t even remember) looked quite ridiculous… and we laughed at that. If I remember rightly it was Sarah that said to me, in her Liverpudlian accent “you got somewhere to go or you wanna come with me for lunch” and that was the beginning of all of this. Thank you for that Sarah. 

S: Meadow of sheer terror. Nice. You can see which of us is the creative one! I remember walking into the first day of the access course and scanning the room to see what seats were empty. The one nearest the door with an empty seat (for a quick getaway in case I hated it) had a couple of people sitting there, one of whom was Award-winning Playwright Kate Wilson. She seemed nice, friendly and funny and we got on like a house on fire. A couple of days later, we were firm friends!

Where do your story ideas come from?

K: Oh, Sarah can answer that first, she is the creator of the madness. 

S: When I was a kid, I loved reading and being read to. My mum was busy, working and looking after the house and us kids, so rarely had the energy to read to us in the evening. We’d beg her to, and she’d reply that she was tired and we should tell ourselves a story. I was never keen on the idea but must’ve chosen to do it anyway. So, since I was young, I’ve been telling myself a short story before going to sleep at night. Most of my stories feature music quite heavily (and are based on ideas inspired by songs) because I listen to music before bed. Sometimes the story only features one night, and sometimes I’ll build on the story over a period of time. I’ve only recently become aware that I do this actually! Or, more accurately, that other people don’t! Multiverse was one of the stories I came up with during lockdown (inspired by the song Doppelganger by Cynthia Lin)  and it was a great escape from the stress of the time. It kind of stuck around for a long time and so became bigger and more developed. And then I told Kate about it…

K: …and that is when I realised that Sarah’s internal monologue is as crazy as mine. My stories can come from anything and I think the fact that I am an over-thinker really comes in handy here. Since I was a kid I have loved to tell stories (or as my mother called them - fibs) and would happily build a new story for myself whenever I met someone new. I just enjoyed creating characters that caught people’s attention or felt a connection with or even just someone people could relate to. As an adult I now find that research tends to send me down a rabbit hole and after reading something brilliant, or shocking, or harrowing, I want to respond in some way with my own writing. 

When did you know that you wanted to write?

K: For me it was as early as I could write. I have always had an overactive imagination and a story to tell so if I wasn’t face to face with someone I could talk at for all of the hours, then I was writing them down. Unfortunately, young me didn’t have as good a filing system as grown up me now does. 

S: Same. My earliest memories are of writing. I learned to write shortly before I started school and would write whatever stories tickled my fancy. I remember being a big fan of an 80s cartoon call ‘Jem and the Holograms’ which told the story of a mild-mannered millionaire’s daughter, Jerrica, who used her AI supercomputer, Synergy, to create a kind of hologram that projected over her own face. She called this alter ego ‘Jem’ and started a rock band called ‘Jem and the Holograms’. Pretty sure she also fought crimes too. The show was all over the place to be honest. Anyhoo, I loved writing - what I now understand to be fan fiction - stories about Jem fighting her rock band nemeses - the Misfits (who were always trying to kill her for some reason) - and coming out on top. It was a damn good show. Look it up.

And I would just like to take a moment to appreciate Kate’s damn fine filing system; without which we would live in a constant state of chaos. 

What’s your favourite aspect of writing?

K: It used to be describing a place, but now I have to say it’s writing dialogue - which is crazy as up to about three years ago I was terrible at writing authentic voices. 

S: I like making the stories up and making myself chuckle. It’s so lovely to just lie back, stick on a few tunes and wait for a story to emerge. I’m also really enjoying working with Kate to turn it into something. It’s been a really interesting experience to hand over something which used to be just in my own head (created purely for my own entertainment) and give it to someone else who is coming up with things that I never would have. It’s like finding a new chapter to your favourite book. I’m loving it so far. 

K: And when she says in her head she means it! In fact we realised about a week into drafting the series that had been running in her head for over a year that the episodes didn’t have sound. When I was attempting to re-create one of her characters, and asked what this character would say in a certain situation, Sarah replied with ‘you know I’ve just realised that in my version they don’t need to talk to each other as I know what they are about to do so they all just kind of nod agreeingly with each other’. There’s obviously more to the story than just nodding but we both found it absolutely hilarious that the vast majority of the story concocted in her mind was a silent movie. 

How do you work collaboratively?

S: Kate does all of the organisation and tells me what to do. And it’s a good job because I haven’t the foggiest! So, Kate, take it away!

K: This is true. I draft the bones of what we need to do to get a project underway and Sarah follows instruction very well. I have a list of goals for us to hit and let’s just say she’s never late with her homework. But that’s just the skeletal work, we brainstorm together and grow the scene together - that’s everything from characterisation, scenes, settings and story arcs. Sarah comes alive when you leave her alone with some characters and is amazing at setting up a back story. You can ask her about any one of our characters (and bloody hell do we have a lot!) and telling you about their history will turn into a story in itself. And don’t get me started on the woman’s Victorian dialogue skills. 

S: Hilariously the excessive description of Victorian writers was one of the things I found most frustrating during my degree. Seriously, I don’t care what exact shade of periwinkle the protagonist's petticoat is. Get on with the bloody story! And here I am inflicting it on others. Vicious cycle. 

K: The main thing to mention though is how we work collaboratively from afar. What we tend to do after the planning stage when we have a story arc, is to take away sections of the script to write individually, then we come together and workshop these, or sometimes we swap and give feedback. This works for us as we find that we will add our own personal flairs to the work but by working collaboratively in the edits means that we make the work stronger. 

When did you decide to write together?

S: April 2022. We had graduated the previous July and each gone on to further study, though I went elsewhere. We met up at Kate’s parent’s house in the Lake District - we were babysitting some very reclusive hedgehogs while her parents were away - and Kate had recently won the Dame Janet Suzman Playwriting prize for her play The Forest Brothers and was telling me all about it. She later suggested we go into business together - doing copywriting or editing - and I decided to tell her about Multiverse because I really value her judgement about whether a story is good or not. Over the next day or so, I gave her a very rough outline of Multiverse - completely soundtracked, naturally - while we wandered around the beach. She loved it and we decided to start working on it together. 

K: From the second day I spent with Sarah I knew I wanted to spend a high portion of my week with her, genuinely! This woman raises you up. You only have to be around her for ten minutes - your sides are splitting and you leave her company feeling like you could wrestle a bee. It hadn’t occurred to me that we could work together in this capacity but I knew I wanted to brainstorm and plan with this woman. When she told me she had an idea for a script in 2022 I nearly bit her arm off to let me work on it with her. I was honestly happy just to workshop if nothing else but Sarah insisted we write the thing together. Just one day writing together we realised it was the best decision we ever made. After that, I was just ecstatic at the thought of what our writing careers would look like. 

S. Wrestle a bee?! Outstanding. That’s going in the bloody show. I think it was meant as a compliment and so choose to take it as one. Thanks hun. As you’ve seen above, Kate has the most fantastic way with words. And she’s so funny, without realising it - which is the best type of funny in my book. Both of us are doing this in our spare time around full-time work and other commitments but, for me, it doesn’t feel like we’re working. For my part, I’m just hanging around with my mate telling and being told stories which make us laugh, cry and look at the world in different ways.  If we’re lucky and this thing takes off, then I’m pretty sure I’ll have found my perfect job.