Goals of a Writers' Salon

Video Transcript

"In this clip we're going to cover accomplishments at your writers salon. Now if you're the one organizing the salon, it's your brain-child, you first of all want to ask yourself, what are you going to want out of it, what kind of situation is really going to benefit you? And then when you start getting some interested people, before even you have the first meeting, kind of talk to them and see where they're coming from and what direction they want to go in. And I mentioned three possible scenarios in a writer's salon. One being writers working together and in that sense, you'll have writers actually performing their own work, or each other’s work, and that's fine if they're not trained actors. The idea is to just hear your work out loud. Also it's a good idea to have an assignment at the end of the evening that people can do during that week and bring back at the following salon. Now of course everyone is so busy with crazy schedules that they're not always going to be able to do it, so if that's the case, the people that haven't done the assignment, allot them ten, fifteen minutes at the next salon meeting to do that assignment. And I think that way too is that during the week they're going to think if they're not off the hook and they're going to have to do it anyway, they're going to find time to do that assignment and bring it in. Now a good idea at each salon is that you all write something together and that can just be a fifteen minute time limit there and make sure you do have a time limit on anything like that. And always give time to meet the new people at your writer's salon, and give everyone a chance to talk and it's sort of like a support group to talk about some of their accomplishments and how things are going with their writing, some of their observations with writing and anything that might come up. Cause that can be very helpful to everyone in the group. But do have a specific structure and a time limit. If you're going from seven to ten, cut it off at ten, I mean, people can hang out afterwards, but cut it off because people have other obligations and babysitters and that type of thing, just so people get in their mind the routine and it's pretty easy for everybody to make it, even with busy schedules they're going to know what to expect. Now the other possibility is having a blend of writers and actors at the salon and the value there is that you have the actors actually performing the scene from your play. Now of course, when you have that, you can't, unless the actors want to participate in the writing too, you can't allot time for only writing because then they won't have anything to do. And it's good too, for when the actor reads your script is to give them a little direction, not that you want to become a director or anything like that, but you might have pictured it a different way, maybe the way the character is reading the lines or the pacing, something like that. So go ahead and give them direction. And if, there will be parts you really love that are right on and parts that don't work as well as you thought or are different, and what you can do by giving direction is it will tell you whether it might be some sort of problem you need to fix with the writing or if it's just the way the actors were approaching the material, or a little combination of both. Now the other type of salon is one in which you incorporate an audience, which is not a formal audience, but basically, its people who are just there to hear some of the other people read. And what can be read is works in progress. It doesn't need to be polished, finished pieces, that's the beauty of a writer's salon. But usually when you have an audience, you don't have critiques or offering direction or anything like that afterwards, it's more of a performance set up. I went to a wonderful salon that was very well organized. They did an amazing job with the food and it had twenty-thirty people, and growing every week, and one of the problems is a few of the people went on and on with their scene. It depends, really, on the number of people you have, but ten minutes is sometimes plenty. So think of all the things you might want to do at your salon. Kind of get a good idea for what direction it's going and use it to spark your creativity toward your projects."