The Further Writers Group Adventures of Third World Girl

Just like the projects in my life, my writers group has entered this weird holding pattern. Instead of the weekly, different participants every seven days, the group has gone back to the infinitely more sane bi-weekly schedule but there's the same volatility in its make up.

I have no idea who'll show week to week. Sometimes it feels like it's just me, the group leader, and a background cast. This kind of makes for vastly different chemistry session to session which I find frustrating because the quality of the feedback is unpredictable.

Last night for example, we had a new addition...let me call her The Holder-Forth. She's the one in the group who has to tell you she's read for contests, knows A-list actors, and inform you of how they do it in "the business". The thing is she was whip smart and gave good feedback and I really hope she returns but she bugged me in one particular, all too familiar way.

Allow me to illustrate.

My script, unsurprisingly, is set in my home country because it's the Little Movie I Want to Direct and I figure the only hope I have of getting it made is to call on every bit of goodwill I've managed to accumulate on the island. Holder-Forth seized on the script's concept and started to wax poetic about the kinds of conflicts I might be exploring seeing as the story involves a girl based in London returning to her island home. "I imagine there'd be quite a contrast between her life in London and on the economically depressed island of Barbados."

I bristled but I let it go. What I really should have said is tell me more about my economically depressed island, Holder-Forth. Do they have houses or does everyone still live in mud huts? It turned out I didn't have to invite her to do so, however, because later on in the feedback she expressed a level of perplexity at why all the characters in the movie didn't know each other. "They live on the same island, right?" she said.

I gently tried to explain to her that my particular island, the "economically depressed island of Barbados" actually had more than a quarter million people on it and therefore not all the characters in my movie know each other. It was possible for people to be strangers and meet for the first time. She shrugged and said, "I'm just telling you what the perception in Hollywood is."

So now I know.

Some days more than others I think I need to hurry up and write my goat racing comedy on an economically depressed island where everybody knows each other because Hollywood would totally get that and then I could sell out and go live in Cobble Hill.