Maureen Clare, Class of 2024: Musical Writing & Development

It’s not easy writing musicals. It’s not easy being a full-time college student. Doing both simultaneously is nothing short of exhausting, but for two years, that’s exactly what my writing partner and I attempted to do.

Our idea was conceived in April of 2020 as we, freshmen at the time, had just completed our virtual Housing Day and were chugging our way through a dismal quarantined spring. These were the first few months of Covid, and we thought a little creative project might help take our minds off of… well, everything. Writing was a lovely escape. As we continued into the fall, both taking gap semesters amidst the height of the pandemic, we had fleshed out a plot and were ready to start writing songs. This is when we discovered another great and terrible truth: writing musicals over Zoom is nearly impossible.

But, being nineteen, very green, creatively excited, and exceptionally bored, we attempted that near impossibility. For two years, we actually got a lot accomplished. By our return to campus in the fall of 2021, we had a near-finalized plot, an experienced mentor, about a hundred (no exaggeration) song drafts, and probably a million (exaggeration) minutes logged on our Zoom accounts. We lived in the same house, had never been more motivated, and finally had the convenience of writing together in person – the sky was the limit! But yet another obstacle emerged that we had completely forgotten. Writing a musical and being full-time college students at the same time is nothing short of exhausting.

We did our best to meet during the year, but with classes, clubs, jobs, and sleep (sometimes), scheduling became a new villain to be reckoned with. We blinked and it was May, so we decided to devote our summers to finishing this project once and for all. Enter the last and greatest obstacle: money. With rent rising in Cambridge and the knowledge that my minimum-wage job wouldn’t allow me to break even, I applied for the Literary Careers Summer Professional Development Award. LC’s award made it possible for me to make a down payment on my rent and live on campus for the summer.

This was when the fun began. While living with my writing partner on campus, everything became magically easier. For the first time, we had access to everything we needed: time, the college’s musical facilities, the convenience that being in-person allowed for spontaneous scene-writing sessions, and friends that we could bounce ideas off of every time we were stuck in a rut. The words flowed, hundreds of ideas came running, songs and scenes seemed to write themselves, and each hour we scheduled to work together turned into two, or three, or five. The momentum we’d been missing over Zoom was at last at our disposal—and the lack of term-time bustle allowed us to zero in on this project completely. In eight weeks between July and August, we got more concrete work done than we did in the two years that had come before them.

We met each week to divvy up the writing of the scenes. Our process was to divide, conquer, swap, and edit, allowing our tones to blend in the rewriting process rather than disrupting the natural flow of a scene’s dialogue with disjointed lines composed by two separate people in one writing session. This kind of experience was invaluable in helping me grow as a writer, since—as I learned and relearned over those two months—working on big projects is as much an administrative endeavor as it is a creative one. As Picasso was known to say, “inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”

The discipline involved in devising one’s own creative schedule and then, most harrowingly, sticking to it, was a muscle that I hadn’t taken the time to develop. In past script-writing projects, my work had been far more guided and externally motivated. My peers and professors have consistently helped me set deadlines, and they have provided a constant stream of high-quality feedback to make sure my work was improving. Over the summer, I had to be the architect of my own creative infrastructure, and though this was stressful at times, it also gave me a new sense of empowerment. I built a sense of trust in myself, knowing that my ideas would not have to remain solely ideas, if I could ensure my own follow-through.

Our mentor—a very successful musical writer with whom my partner had interned over a previous summer—provided guidance on plot, songwriting, and dialogue that informed the entirety of our progress. I remember being struck by the amount of good that one invested third party can do for an original project. One day, I hope to learn enough and be that person for somebody else.

My writing partner and I are now almost done with a script. We have a finalized plot, and nine out of fourteen songs have been completed. My opinion remains unchanged: it’s not easy writing a script. But it’s been weird, wonderful, thrilling, rewarding, exhausting (in the best way), surprising, and a lot of fun. What existed only in our heads two years ago and almost exclusively in our conversations up until two months ago now exists on paper—and in about three thousand scattered voice memos. What I thought was unrealizable is now tangible: a living and breathing story that my writing partner and I can continue to grow and put on a stage sometime soon. This feeling and those two months of writing have been a huge gift, for which I’m extremely grateful.