In a post on Lit Reactor, Peter Derk shares his experience creating a hip-hop horror opera mashup for his podcast called Phantom of the Hip Hopera. It started as a series of daily podcasts for October. “And what it turned into was an experiment in writing a novella through improv,” Derk says.
Derk walks through how he chose his concept and the challenges. “How do you write something that makes fun of something else without rewriting the entire thing?” he wondered. Or, how do you write Phantom of the Hip-Hopera so that people who haven’t read Phantom of the Opera 100 times will still enjoy it? How do you explain what you’re doing while also doing what you’re doing?”
Derk solved some of his challenges by making his main character the writer of the mashup. He leveraged the podcast format by crafting the story as the MC’s audio diary of the process. From there, he fleshed out a general outline for each episode, leaving room for improvised dialogue and actions.
Then he decided to transcribe all 31 episodes. “Transcribing speech is the most boring activity in writing,” Derk says. “But in this case, it’s also the fun part. Because with Phantom of the Hip-Hopera, it wasn’t just a word-for-word transcription, I was adding things, moving things around, normal rewrite stuff, but it felt different. I kind of got to write this story again for the first time.” From his transcription, Derk got a polished second draft of his novella.
Derk says there are a lot of good reasons to try this approach to drafting. “It might be a little easier to talk in a character’s voice than it is to write in one,” he says. “It might be easier to let the story take you places when you start out loud.” Further, in the editing process, it’s easier to toss out something that doesn’t work, because you spent less time on it. But be warned – the process requires commitment. “You have to really talk it out, like you’re doing a character on a stage,” Derk writes. “You have to try and make it feel real, just to you anyway. It feels silly, but it’s worth it.”
