Coming to LA? Welcome to the fray. Now that you’re in town, here are ways to settle in and become part of the writing community. LA is peppered with writers groups, but you’ll have to do some work to find the one that best meet your needs. Most just have simple meet and greets and invite speakers to address the group. The largest such organization is The Scriptwriters Network. Check out their web site for contact and monthly meeting information. It’s a big organization that has divisions for TV and feature writing and annual writing competitions (feature and TV) that get coverage in the trade magazines.
However, the town is also bursting with smaller writers groups. Many of the theaters in LA have associated writers groups (many only deal with plays). I belong to one that meets every Wednesday. On a typical night, four writers get to present 30 minutes of material, but it can be any form of writing from novels to poetry to articles for magazines to plays and screenplays. If the piece is a screenplay or a play, the author casts it with the working SAG actors in the group. The actors and a narrator, who reads everything that’s not dialogue, take the stage for a cold reading. After the reading, the actors sit and the writer(s) takes the stage with a moderator and receives 15 minutes of feedback. We meet in a small theater in Studio City.
UCLA has a massive adult Extension Program as well as several layers of professional screenwriting programs from undergraduate studies to the MFA program and the Professional Program in screenwriting (an offshoot of the MFA program). In any of these programs, you can make contacts with other student writers and teachers, and through those contacts find writer groups. It will take some digging and visiting various organizations to find a group that best meets your needs, but I recommend that you just get out there and start meeting writers. Look up the theaters in the area and make a call to see if they have a resident writers group. Go to the Scriptwriters Network meetings (and any other writers meeting you can find) and start asking people about the lay of the land. I find that writers are excited to talk about the groups they belong to, and are more than happy to tell you about them.
One very ambitious and outgoing writing friend of mine makes his contacts in bars. He’s prolific in this respect. He’s one of those gregarious people who meets strangers easily (an extremely uncommon trait among writers). He can go into a bar and within a short period of time have made contact in some form with everyone in the place. When he first moved to LA, he targeted bars near the major studios. Through the people he met there, he quickly narrowed down at which bars the producers and writers from the studios tended to hang out. He started becoming a regular at those bars and made friends that lead to a job within the industry (non-writing, but at a studio), and that lead to other opportunities. Also, once settled, he started holding small parties at his apartment and inviting the people he was meeting. They brought other friends and he made more contacts. Now, several years later, he’s firmly in the middle of the mix, working with producers and studios and close to making that break.
So, if you want to make it in this town, you have to do the leg work as well as the finger-to-the-keyboard work. |
