A Remote, Async Writers Room: A Case Study in Creative Project Management

Picture this: you have a bunch of creative, hungry writers ready to start writing a sitcom together. You have the premise of the sitcom, all the time you need to write it, and the means to record said sitcom as an audio drama once it's written.

The catch? Those hungry, creative writers are all over the globe. Many of them have day jobs. There is no way to meet in person, and no way to sync up regularly for brainstorming sessions or co-writing in a video call.

If you know me through my podcast network, Faustian Nonsense, you may be able to tell I'm talking about SUPER SUITS, our workplace sitcom about a law firm in a comic book universe. We went on to write 20 episodes, successfully crowdfund the first season, and produce it. Most of the episodes have been released as of my writing this post, and it remains one of the projects I'm proudest to be a part of.

But damn was it tricky on the process side.

It started in our network Discord server's #ideas channel. The network consists of a bunch of podcast creators, banding together to support each other in production and cross-promotion. But if you're a creative yourself, you know: one of the biggest challenges is avoiding the siren song of new ideas. They're always calling to you, trying to get you to crash your current projects on the rocks of split focus.

Our solution is a channel where anyone can post an idea and play around with it. Usually, this is enough to purge the idea. It's like stranding all the sirens on one island together in the middle of the ocean--it couldn't possibly go wrong. (Yes this metaphor is getting strained but I'm stubborn.)

So one day, a network member posts the premise of SUPER SUITS ("susu" from here on out). And we all start steering our ships toward it. It was a real problem. Everyone got excited. Premises for episodes started pouring out in the #ideas channel, and suddenly I was volunteering to run a writers room and creating a new Discord server for the purpose.

I'm a huge fan of television, and I've always wanted to be a part of a writers room for a series. So I jumped at the chance. But I also...had never done this before. So I sat down to work out how the hell to do it.

I started by researching traditional TV rooms. Everything I could find had the same general setup (with variations of how they divided labor within that setup): a bunch of writers are employed full time, and they get together each day in a room and workshop their episode ideas, plotlines, and structures. They might send scripts home with individual writers to work on solo, but the thing about a non-anthology series? It needs to have a consistent tone, consistent world-building, and consistent characterization. And that requires pretty constant contact between the writers.

Not to mention, keeping everyone focused and energized for creative work!

I was in Boulder, Colorado at the time. I had writers in Boston, Seattle, Oregon, and Ireland, with additional contributors in Sweden, London, New York, Florida... Honestly I've forgotten where a lot of folks were located, and many of us have moved since then. And almost everyone was busy. Too busy by far to synchronize with any regularity, let alone daily.

Discord (with a dedicated server for this project) was a good starting point and home base--vital for the "staying in constant contact" part, asynchronously. We could have used Slack, or something similar, but we were all used to Discord.

But before I could structure the server to be truly useful, I needed a plan. A process.

So I prioritized. What parts of the series had to be figured out as a group? And how could we make and track those collective decisions throughout the project?

Some big-picture elements had to be decided as a group, and were simply easier to do in a meeting: who were our main characters? What kind of structure would each episode have? What was the setting for the series?

Other aspects we could figure out individually. Specific episodes could be written by one or two authors, as long as we all agreed on character and setting decisions. But even then, we needed a way to track and avoid overlap. We didn't want two different scripts about parking laws for invisible jets.

Here's a basic outline of the process I came up with:

1. An initial group meeting to determine broad strokes of the characters and world, and to agree on this process, essentially a brainstorming session. (I proposed it and everyone liked it, so the process part of this meeting went quickly!)
2. Channels in the Discord server for each character, where we could track and discuss decisions made about them in one place where we could easily look up what we'd decided.
3. A channel in the server for worldbuilding decisions, and another for legal worldbuilding decisions (when we made up a statute about superhero regulation, for instance).
4. An episode spreadsheet on Google Drive, linked from the episode ideas channel in a pinned message. The sheet had a column for the idea, a column for a writer to claim the outline, and a column for a writer to claim the draft.
5. An "ideas" channel for episode concepts, for open discussion and refinement. Once someone liked an idea enough to claim it, they would add it to the spreadsheet and put their name in the appropriate column.
6. Once a writer started outlining an episode, they also created a dedicated channel for that episode in the server--any discussion specific to that episode would go there, and when an outline was ready for review or drafting, the Drive link went in that channel.
7. We created a server role called "@Help!" that could be tagged to summon quick suggestions. Need a quick pun for a restaurant? A supervillain concept for a noodle incident? Fellow writers and other members of the server could take the @Help! role and show up when tagged to provide suggestions, so a script wouldn't get hung up on small details.
8. Once enough episodes were outlined or drafted for every writer to have a feel for the characters we were building, we would have another meeting to check in and decide on overall character arcs. Episodes were largely standalone and procedural, focusing on a specific legal case that would be resolved by end of episode, so it was easy to reorder or even add scenes for character development once season arcs were figured out.
9. Finally, when all 20 episodes were at least outlined, we had one meeting to decide on the order, and assign writers to edit each other's episodes. The biggest challenge for editing was length--some writers tended to write far longer scripts than others.
10. Once we had full drafts for all episodes, the two head writers (including myself) each took on half of the characters. We read through the whole season in order, ensuring those characters were written consistently and that their arcs made sense.

Steps 1-6 were decided in that initial meeting. The rest came up organically as we discovered what we needed.

The key was staying in touch with each other--no writer should feel alone in their task! Any questions about how a character should be written, we had a channel for that. Decisions to be made about plotlines, ask advice in the episode channel!

Thousands of tiny decisions had to be made. Sure, we knew from our initial meeting that our lead character was a summer associate at the law firm named Harper, that they were a nonbinary gunner law student, extremely earnest, that their mother was secretly a major superhero, that they themself had no superpowers.

But along the way so many questions arose, often tiny but hugely impactful on the scripts. One example: how formally would they address their coworkers? Much of the dialogue was between Harper and various lawyers at the firm, so would they say "Ms./Mr./Mx." or just a name? Would it vary by level of authority at the firm? What about when they talk about one colleague with another? This came up with almost every line of dialogue, but we hadn't thought to discuss it in the initial meeting. But the character channel in Discord meant we could cover this question immediately as a group, and anyone wondering later could check that channel for reference.

This system allowed for close collaboration and kept energy up. Day or night, you could almost always get an answer from somebody in the server, and it kept the project active and top-of-mind for everyone.

From my perspective as a showrunner, I could always see what other writers were working on. I could check in if I hadn't heard about a script in awhile, to clear any blockers.

I also made sure to check in generally on how the process was working, and adjust as needed. I learned that some folks found the character and worldbuilding channels unwieldy for quickly referencing a detail, so I created a show bible for easier reference that I updated when new major decisions were made. I added the @Help! role when people kept getting stuck on little details.

But overall, this process worked! We came out the other end with 20 scripts, which were a delight to produce and have been well-received by our listeners.

So...what does this have to do with project management? I thought you said this was a case study?

I did, and I meant it. Not only was this a project, which I managed, I actually argue we (entirely accidentally) used a variant of Agile. (Not, obviously, Scrum, and no I won't be going over the difference here.)

I actually took project management courses after writing SuSu. And spent most of it thinking "well, yeah, of course you do it that way if the project calls for it!" and also "huh, yeah that's pretty much what we do at FN! As much as we can asynchronously."

Ok, so, Agile. The core of Agile, as I see it, is the focus on speed and iteration. You jump write in (this was a mistype, but I'm leaving it in and pretending it's a deliberate pun), and then adjust to how things go. Which we did, immediately starting to write after our initial character/worldbuilding meeting to start playing with those characters in that world and seeing what happened.

We didn't have user testing to give us feedback, but we did have each other, and some other network folks around to react to our ideas and our drafts. We uncovered needs (x character has to undergo y development!) and filled those gaps (an episode putting x character through Experiences) as we went.

If you're experienced in project management (and a manager or managee), you may notice one thing I haven't talked about at all: timelines. I certainly haven't mentioned deadlines. Or schedules. Or, gods forbid, sprints.

That's because this project was a side gig for most writers, and we had no specific need to finish by a certain time. Any deadlines would have been entirely manufactured, fake deadlines, and those are just annoying. And creative people chafe at such things. Instead, my focus was on momentum: keeping the conversations going, the energy up, and the drafts flowing, at whatever pace they needed to.

Sometime in the middle of writing we decided to crowdfund, so eventually we did have sort-of deadlines. We picked the crowdfunding campaign dates based on when we expected to have at least rough drafts finished, and waited to announce those dates until we were confident we were right, so it was pretty late in the game that we set those "deadlines."

(The crowdfunding dates were not chosen well. That's a whole different story, but here's the short version: if you want to do a Kickstarter or similar campaign, do not, I repeat, do not schedule it the same month you're scheduled for brain surgery. On your brain. Which you need, for running the campaign.)

So what's my takeaway from this whole experience?

Any project you take on that involves multiple people absolutely needs a process in place from the start to run smoothly, even if it seems like a fun creative project. That process doesn't need to be (and probably shouldn't be) something strict or "industry standard" in any way, but it needs to exist and fit the project's needs and limitations. I can guarantee that without the thought I put into this, SuSu would either (a) not exist, because we would never have finished it, or (b) have only 1-2 writers, because everyone else would have faded off the project. As it is, we were able to bring in a range of writing voices and crank out a huge season that flowed beautifully.

If you'd like to hear the results, you can check out the show SUPER SUITS here or on your favorite podcast platform.