Strangers in a Coffee Shop

Like many aspiring writers out there, I spend a lot of time in coffee shops. For me it's mental survival; I spend way too much time locked away alone in my apartment reading, and there are days when I just need to escape for 2-4 hours, while still getting some work done.

Still, I'd hear stories of people striking up conversations with writers in coffee shops, fellow writers bonding over caffeine and laptop plugs, and it always seemed a little strange to me, because I never talk with strangers in coffee shops. Ever. And they rarely talk to me, and when they do they are usually really odd. (I sense you trying to picture this odd person. No, odder than that. No, still odder.)

I don't think it's because I look unapproachable. It's likely because I'm shy, which to people who know me might come as something of a surprise. But I'm very quiet around people I don't know at all, while I'm way too over-analytical in my head about why I shouldn't talk to someone because I'd probably just annoy them.

So yeah, I've seen people writing screenplays in coffee shops. And no, I've never, ever talked to them.

Before today.

Ironically, yesterday (Tuesday), I had an arranged-meeting with another blogger in a coffee shop, and she was the umpteenth person who'd actually brought up having struck up conversations with strange screenwriters in coffee shops.

So I had that in the back of my mind today, as I wound up in a Woodland Hills Starbucks. Thanks to one of those inexplicable things, in which a coffee shop is empty one minute and filled the next, there was only one empty table, with the seat awkwardly facing the corner, where two other guys, each at their own table, sat. On one was a guy on a laptop, with screenplay pages next to him. The other was a guy in his 50s, who sipped his coffee and people-watched.

I brought out some script pages and a pen, and I was getting ready to finally make this key sequence work when the guy with the coffee noticed me and laughed. He made a comment about how we (me and laptop guy) both brought our scripts with us, and he left his at home.

Even with this conversational opening big enough to drive a truck through, normally I would have made some small talk, then drifted back into my screenplay. But I'm trying to be the new Scott. Writer Scott. The kind of guy that actually talks to other writers in coffee shops.

So I engaged him in conversation, and we wound up talking about a bevy of things, from movies to straight-to-DVD stuff (some of which he has written; he seems very much like a man out of Bill Cunningham's heart), to residuals, to breaking into the business.

Turns out he's been writing professionally for 30 years, mostly TV, some cable stuff, and one movie I'd actually seen in theaters a number of years ago (though odds are you didn't). Laptop guy even joined in too; turns out he's got a $1 million budget movie going into production, and he's trying to pound out his next script.

And it was great, it was cool, it was everything you could possibly want in a random conversation with two guys who just out of a random confluence of events just happened to be sharing the same 20 square feet of space in a coffee shop one afternoon.

Then coffee guy got a phone call, and he was gone, and laptop guy went back to his script, and I went back to mine. Though I did say goodbye to him when I left an hour later.

Who knows when I'll talk to someone in a coffee shop again. I don't want to be the guy who is talking to you while you are working on your script, the guy who you wish would just go back to his.

I mean, what's the general feeling out there? How often does someone come up to you in a coffee shop because they see you are writing, and strike up a conversation? How often do you do it?

(And I'm happily married, so I'm not talking about meeting a potential romantic interest. That's a whole other category of coffee shop discussion. Though obviously pretty girls writing screenplays in coffee shops must get hit on a lot -- it seems like a good conversational opening if you want to strike one up).

Anyhow, I'm sure I'll be out at a Starbucks or a Coffee Bean or a bagel shop tomorrow (probably somewhere west of Burbank, south of the freeway), and if you see me, feel free to come up and say hi.

It's easy to recognize me. I'm the mute guy in the corner.