To noodle or not to noodle

As a professional writer, I've always been pretty good at not writing. Not writing, in fact, is one of my chief skills. I can not write anywhere -- on a plane, in a coffee shop, in my office -- and I often feel that a day spent without not writing is a day wasted. I even keep a notebook by the side of the bed, in case I wake up with an idea at 3 in the morning and don't want to write it down in case I don't forget it.

So, obviously, the prospect of a writers strike puts me in a curious position. Among the many proclamations and communiques issued by the leadership of the Writers Guild of America, as it marches its membership to glorious and pointless suicide, is an alarming list of things we're not supposed to do if there's a strike. Mostly, these involve some form of writing, which is something I tend not to do anyway. But left purposely vague, it seems to me, is the whole notion of noodling. You know: not really writing writing, but noodling around an area. Playing with an arena. Staring off into space and thinking about a scene you might write if you could, you know, just grab two days or a weekend in Big Sur and plow through it.

When I think of writing, that's pretty much what comes to mind: sitting around, drinking a pumpkin latte and checking my e-mail every seven seconds. And my question is, if there's a strike, am I still allowed to do that?

Or, for that matter, this? Right now, I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Venice, surrounded by muttering derelicts, writing prose for the Los Angeles Times. But what if I suddenly wrote

CUT TO:

INT. COFFEE SHOP IN VENICE -- DAY

Rob sits at a table, typing on his MacBook Pro, surrounded by muttering derelicts. He looks up from his computer.

ROB

I'm pretty sure if there's a strike, I won't be allowed to write something in this format. In fact, in the angry, paranoid atmosphere of a WGA labor dispute, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the guild leadership was organizing a network of spies to station at various writers' hangouts around town, like the Office in Brentwood or the 18th Street Coffeehouse in Santa Monica, to identify the traitors and scabs among us.

One of the derelicts next to Rob leans over and peers at the screen on his laptop.

DERELICT

(into a small microphone under his shirt cuff)

It's confirmed. Repeat: confirmed. A Final Draft document is open on the desktop. Move in!

Rob quickly shuts the laptop and hurries off.