2025-02-18

On joining a salon

On Friday, I was invited to join an online gathering of writers and other freelance creative types. I'm going to call it a salon, even though I know they wouldn't. It was a salon.

Screenwriting is a pretty lonely profession. You meet producers and development people by the dozen, obviously, but they are more or less marking your homework, not hanging out with you. And in the event that a script you wrote gets turned into a movie, you become the absolute last person anyone wants to talk to.

I'm lucky because I also get to wear the director's hat occasionally and that, as anyone who has seen 8 1/2 or La Nuit Americaine will know, is the opposite of lonely.

But nonetheless, a lot of my time is spent sitting in front of a screen, translating ideas into words. And that’s by no means a bad way to spend the day, but it can tend to be a little interior and so it’s nice to make contact with other human beings now and again.

The human beings in this particular salon (I did it again) do pretty much what I do, or a variation thereof, and that is an unusual crowd for me to be in. I suppose that’s why I’m calling it a salon, because I have heard tell of writers gathering together but rarely witnessed it outside of a writers room (which is work, not a gathering). It turns out I like it - there’s a shorthand to it that none of us have with non-writer friends, a shared experience of spending too much time inside your own head but not always wanting to come entirely out of it.

I was invited to this gathering because a number of the members of this group are fans of the Lovecraft investigations and wanted to garner a little behind-the-scenes info. That was flattering, obviously (especially as I had no advance word on who would be there and it turned out that there are several members of the group whose work I am also a fan of). What was more flattering, though, was that I was invited to join the group (it’s a salon) afterwards.

So now I’m in a gang. A probationary member, certainly, until I commit my first murder (am I confusing this with something else?), but a member nonetheless. I am yet to inquire about rules or secret handshakes, but I’m sure that will be forthcoming with the welcome pack, which I’m expecting to include a badge, a codebook and some invisible ink.