This blog post is co-written by Avril David and Adam J. Spencer.

It started with a blog post. Heartfelt, thoughtful, a little disarming. Then a like. Then a comment. Then a request to connect.

Not long after, we were trading paragraphs: notes, questions, arguments about each other’s pages. Neither of us had gone looking for a creative partnership. We were responding to work we respected.

Somewhere between the pages and the conversations, we figured something out. Working alone was only going to get us so far.

Eventually one of us said it out loud:

Would you be interested in partnering on this? I’m talking about putting your hands on the script, sharpening it together. I think we’d be stronger together on this one than either of us would be alone.

That was the beginning of what we came to call a studio of two.

Not a company. Not a writers’ room. Two people who stepped far enough out of their own shadows to find out that the right witness changes the work.

Here’s what we learned.

1- Respect

It started with genuine respect for each other’s work.

We found a shared affection for mythology, fantasy, worldbuilding, and stories built on love, transformation, sacrifice, and consequence. But admiration by itself only gets you so far. What mattered was getting specific about why something worked.

Avril: Thank you for reading and engaging with the script. I am blown away by the sensitivity and care you put into your notes. As for yours, I love it. Masterful character and worldbuilding, exceptional pacing, powerful story. The mythology, the original sacrifice and how that meaning was lost over time, is fascinating. I’ve never seen or read anything like this.

Adam: You just told me something that shifted everything about how I understand the story. You showed me that his tragedy isn’t about power. It’s about love. He had to watch his creation become free in a way that excluded him. That’s mercy in its cruelest form. That’s what it costs to love something you can’t control.

That kind of exchange does more than make a writer feel good. It teaches the writer something about their own work.

Sometimes another person can see the architecture you built before you understand why you built it.

2- Trust

Respect opened the door. Trust let us go farther through it.

We come from very different places and found overlapping values. As the work got more personal, so did the conversations around it. At some point we started sharing context – where we came from, what shaped us, what we carry.

Adam: Poor family in rural Appalachia. Youngest of five. My dad was a gas station attendant and unpaid preacher. My mom, a school bus driver. We lived in a nearly 100-year-old farmhouse my great-grandfather built. Two bedrooms, asbestos siding, surrounded by ancient deciduous forest. There was a lot of love in that house. Little else.

Avril: I’m also the youngest, by the way. Of four. Two older sisters and an older brother. Mom was a nurse and Dad was a factory worker before retirement. Small town South Jersey. My first school trip in kindergarten was to a local farm. We were the only Caribbean family around back then.

Those histories are different. They also contain strange little rhymes. Family. Small towns. Working-class parents. Being shaped by places that looked ordinary from the inside and got more complicated from a distance.

Knowing that changed the notes. Criticism stopped being purely technical. We each understood a little more about why the other person might be protecting a character, an image, a piece of emotional territory.

One of the harder notes came when Avril told Adam that a script he cared deeply about was asking the reader to carry too much while still learning the world and its characters. The architecture became clear to her when she read the synopsis, but on the page, a major climax had required rereading.

It wasn’t an easy note to hear. It was also difficult to dismiss, because another reader had independently stumbled in almost exactly the same place. The script was already locked, so there was no frantic rewrite. The note became something more useful: a failure understood clearly enough to carry forward.

Vulnerability didn’t make the criticism softer. It made it more accurate.

3- Complementary Strengths

Finding someone willing to genuinely read is rarer than it should be. Not skim. Not glance at ten pages and offer three familiar screenwriting observations. Read.

That willingness matters, because sometimes the encouragement you need is just the encouragement of being seen clearly.

Our strengths aren’t identical, and that turned out to be the point.

Adam: Avril saw things in my worldbuilding I had stopped being able to see, because I’d lived inside those worlds too long. I’ve spent years building them in the quiet of the mountains. Creation without echo stays unshaped. Eventually the work needs a witness.

What drew each of us to the other’s pages was different, too: the emotional machinery underneath, the places where mythology and character carry the same argument in two different languages.

You don’t need someone who writes like you. You need someone who sees what you miss.

4- The Harder Skill

Witness becomes critique, and critique is where most partnerships either earn their keep or quietly go wrong.

Get good enough at taking notes and almost every note becomes executable. You can change nearly anything.

The harder skill is knowing which changes make the story more itself, and which ones slowly replace it with somebody else’s story.

A trusted partner helps you hear the difference. They help you tell a crack that needs mending from a structural choice that needs defending. That distinction is worth more than any single note either of us has ever given the other.

Looking Ahead

This industry can feel like an elaborate waiting room. You wait for reads, responses, contests, meetings, submissions, introductions, decisions.

Waiting doesn’t have to mean sitting still.

At its most active, our studio of two is a place to trade pages, argue about structure, look at pitch materials, set deadlines, and occasionally say the thing the other person really doesn’t want to hear.

It isn’t constant. Life moves. People relocate, families need attention, careers change seasons. One project takes everything one of us has while the other disappears into something else entirely. The value of the relationship isn’t measured in pages exchanged this month. It’s knowing that somewhere in this strange business there’s another person who understands the work, understands something about the person making it, and wants both to come through the process intact.

The industry requires those people. Thanks to Stage 32, we happened to find each other here.

If you’re still working entirely in the shadows, we understand why. Showing unfinished work to someone else can feel more dangerous than finishing it alone.

But you don’t need a room full of collaborators. You might only need one.

Someone whose work you respect. Someone whose judgment you trust. Someone willing to tell you when the story has a crack, and willing to stand beside you when everybody else insists the load-bearing wall ought to come down.

Sometimes a studio only needs two chairs.

Let's hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Got an idea for a post? Or have you collaborated with Stage 32 members to create a project? We'd love to hear about it. Email Ashley at blog@stage32.com and let's get your post published!

Please help support your fellow Stage 32ers by sharing this on social. Check out the social media buttons at the top to share on Instagram @stage32 , Twitter @stage32 , Facebook @stage32 , and LinkedIn @stage-32 .