Doing It In a Group

No, not like that one time in college when we were all drunk.  Well, I wasn’t drunk; I was just male.

Anyway.

I’m talking about my writers’ group.  We had our first meeting in a couple months last night, and it was great.

Being a bunch of writers, we did everything in our power to avoid the task at hand.  We talked about movies that were tangentially related to our screenplays; we talked about movies we’d seen recently; we talked about movies we wanted to see; we ate dinner; we talked about our jobs, lack of jobs, or potential, future, possible jobs; we talked about politics, monkeys, and the relative merits of the term “boobs” as opposed to “breasts.”

After an hour and a half of discussed everything of even moderate interest to any of us, we talked about our scripts.

And we actually got stuff done!  I figured out how to tie up some loose ends in my romantic comedy.  One guy got some good advice for tightening up his voice over.  Another girl found some direction to a plot that was floundering.  (I tried once again to convince her to change the depressing ending of one of her scripts, but she refuses to listen to reason.)

It was so fun and helpful that I started to wonder, is this what a writing room is like?  Dicking around until something good happens?  I sure hope so.

On a side note, a friend sent me a script that’s 126 pages long.  The title page makes it 127 pages, which frustrates me to no end, because I print scripts in sections, rather than in one huge stack.  Since 127 is a prime number, I can’t break it up into equal portions.

Is it weird that this bothers me?