Hanging Out With Writers

So late Tuesday afternoon I lugged my bones down to Westwood, to meet with two fellow writers who are separately in town for the week (despite both coincidentally being from the same general area of the Midwest); one was a Nicholl semifinalist last year, and one is one this year, so we're all in the same huge subsection of aspiring-but-hopeful screenwriters.

We met at a Starbucks for an hour or two, then wandered across the street to a bar for some drinks/dinner, and just spent a couple more hours there, just talking about movies, and about writing, and the hunt for representation, and just shooting the shit.

And it was a lot of fun, and it made me realize that it has been a long time since I have done that.

There are writers in L.A. that I occasionally get together with, but too often those evenings have a different thrust; we play poker or Scene It, or watch short films, and it's great, but it's different. There isn't enough pure writing/movies talk.

One of the two guys I met the other night is about to move to L.A., despite the fact that he knows no one here. And then yesterday, on the Wordplayer board, another writer posted a similar query; he's fairly new in L.A., and wants to know where to go to meet writers.

I replied with the suggestion that maybe it's time to put together something regular. Come up with a location where a group of people meet to hang out. Maybe once or twice a month at first; maybe, once it gets rolling, every single week.

A regular place, a regular time. If you want to go, you can; if you don't, you don't have to. No pressure, no RSVPs, just a place you can drop by and find people like yourselves.

Logistically it's tricky. Just in terms of avoiding traffic (for those of us north of the hills), Saturday nights might be best. It would be great to find a place somewhere centrally located, say in Westwood, that has the space to accomodate fluctuating groups, whether 2 people show up on a particular night, or 40.

When I lived in Manhattan in the 1990s, I regularly attended a somewhat-similar group, that met in a Times Square Howard Johnson's every Friday night for years. I once blogged about it here.

Even though that group was not screenwriter-centric (while Howard Johnson's is gone, and the group has apparently scattered), it did show that the basic concept works, and there's no reason why a regular gathering of screenwriters can't work either, whether we hook it into seeing a movie the same night or not.

Anyone who is interested in attending, or helping to get this to work, post here, or e-mail me privately. Because it's time.