BEHIND THE SCENES AT JUMP FALL FLY - WRITING THE SHOWS

POSTED BY JFFCOMMS ON AUG 15, 2019

When sitting down to watch a show you don’t get to see the months leading up to that show.
So here is a little journey in to the writing of The Last Fairy and the Black Crow Queen.
Stories for us arrive, I know that may sound weird but we don’t sit down to write them, they kind of knock at our doors and don’t leave us alone and until we have to write them down. I say ‘we’ because Anthony and I write these things together and it can come out of a small idea, or a visual, or something that we have read. It is hard to know what triggers the story but something big does and it is hard to put words as to where they come from.

Then we voice it out, normally whilst walking, sometimes we audio record it on the phone, so that we don’t forget the story, sometimes I draw pictures, sometimes we write things. But we always have a piece of string with A4 sheets of paper hanging off them and coloured pegs, although we are ditching the plastic pegs for something, well, less plastic.

Then the story weaves it way collectively out of us, sometimes we start at the end, sometimes the middle, and for this show, we started three shows ahead.

We wrote the first one, it was too big, so we decided to write the prequel, that was too big, so whilst in the vegetable garden Ant shouts out ‘The Last Fairy’ and talks and talks about ‘The Last Fairy’. The story flows out like a river and I hear the crows in the tree where we live and then ‘The Black Crow Queen’ lands in my head and from there we continue the story, a little like running too fast down a hill, or being on a bike without brakes.

This show is the pre prequel! We wanted it to be smaller than the rest but it still turned into an epic because we like epic, it seems, or epic likes us and we follow what is landing in our collective heads from who knows where.

How do your stories arrive…?