Writing Meetings

We had a couple of small writing meetings outside of the regular planning meetings, because the writing of the "script" had become a whole new animal from the planning of the event in general.
We have on the writing team 4 people with 4 various backgrounds.
The lead writer is a circulation staff member.
I am one of the contributors.
One volunteer who is a retired teacher of 20 years with an interest in mystery writing.
One volunteer who is a local published murder mystery author.

The mystery author is also a writing professor, so she was referred to in cases of tweaking and planning. The teacher, the circ worker and myself, a reference librarian got together in person a couple of times and compared notes. Each time, having brought various ideas and multiple sketches of what we had in mind.

The volunteer who is a former teacher dropped out essentially during the Xmas break time when her daughter was visiting for a while. But she still communicates with us via email on ideas.

The head writer and myself had a few in person meeting, but the bulk of our editing was done on google documents which is an amazing tool for this purpose. If you have a google email account (Gmail) then you can share a document that you are working on with other Gmail users by inviting them to be an editor or a reader.

The only problems we ran into on this format is the one time he started a new version, but forgot to share with me....

The types of people in this were so different! I think that was a very good thing to help us with a nice blend for the final product.
My own personal style is super-simple.
The head writer's style is uber-complex.
The volunteers style is far-out creative.

None of us triumphed over the other, rather we met in the middle to create a creative, detailed and rich murder-mystery plot!

The basic format was difficult to come up with but once settled upon should work very well. I highly reccommend you copy this format if you are having your first after-hours murder mystery fundraising event for your library:
Ten groups meet in the library for example: The Mystery Bookclub, Gardening Club, the Children's Literature Bookclub. Each group has about ten "members" which are actually ticketholders who are assigned to these fictional or semi-fictional clubs.

That format makes it much easier for mystery participants to figure out who's-who in the plot, by way of having nametags identifying which group is which and where they will meet when not wandering around getting wine and food.