My Experience in Writing "A Fat Soul"

"Your first assignment is to write a drama script in a group of 2 to 3 people", Dr. Edwin said.

Arghhhhhh....... script? Writing a script? Script? I have never seen myself as a potential or possible script writer for anything. It just seems so hard to me. I could not even write an interesting short story or essay so I kept thinking, "How am I going to cope?".

It is somehow a good thing that it is a group work. There are pros and cons of writing a script in a group. The pros will be that things will get done faster when there are three brains thinking and while the cons will be that there will be clashes or ideas and complains of who does the most work in the group. It is a good thing that there are no quarrels between my group members. There are Jamine Wong Xin Yee, Ho Jia Yiing, and i myself, Lam Hui Nee.

The first thing I did when the task was given was THINK!!! Think of what? The storyline for the script of course. It was tough though. But, Jasmine, my group member, also the head of the group, came out with the theme, 'love' and named our drama, "A Fat Soul". She started off with the script. She wrote the first 2 scenes and Jia Yiing wrote the 3rd and 4th scenes, while I wrote the next last two scenes. This sounds crazy, but it is really how we started of with our script. The reason? To be fair and square.

When the script was done, Jasmine read through and thought that the script was not appealing.

"Nee, your dialogues are lengthy and wishy-washy." Jasmine commented when she came to read the script in my room.

I was so sad, not because of her comment, but because I did not really help in making the script a good one. Jasmine edited the storyline and I was there watching as while. I really have to give special credit to her because she did the most work in the group.

We handed in our first draft without the teacher's guide part, but Mr. Harold said our script is interesting. We were so happy. There were little grammatical mistake.

I felt guilty and because I did not do well for my part so took the initiative to write the teacher's guide for the drama script. It was hard to write a two paged teacher's guide, but i managed to do it and passed to Jasmine again to edit. She did the edition and I printed the work as the second draft.

We are lucky that Dr. Edwin marked our script but we are unsure of the real situation. He just gave a tick on the front page without leaving any comments. We are actually in a mixed feelings. Who knows he actually did not finished reading our script. I hope that is not true. Anyway, we are waiting patiently for our thrid draft to be given back.

Throughout the process of writing the script, i have learnt few things:

1. We must be ready to accept ideas of group members.
2. We must not feel hurt and keep grudges when people commented on your writing.
3. We must take other people's comment as a guideline to improve in our writing.
4. We must sit down together as a group and discuss how our storyline should be before start to write the script.
5. Group work is important.
6. Every members in the group has the responsiblility to read and check the script from time to time for grammatical errors and sentence structures errors.
7. Writing a script is a good way in improving our understanding on drama and play because;

• We learn how a drama should be like.
• We learn how to choose the setting so that the written drama can be used in a classroom activities.
• We also learn that the characters we have chosen for our play must be suitable for a classroom activity.
• We learn that the stage direction should be in present simple tense only!

I have gained much experience and I really enjoy writing a script. It is a way to improve my understanding of a drama and also to improve my writing skills. I learn from people's comments and reflect on my weaknesses and hope to improve fro the better. I believe that this experience can help me in my teaching in schools for the future. I will be able to choose a an appropriate drama as a class activity next time. And who knows, I might use this script that we have wrote on as my classroom activity in the future.