On striking
Why what the WGA is fighting for prevents the hobbyification of creative writing, and why that fight might already be lost.
The WGA strike started a week ago, and of course, I’m in full support of it. I’ll tell you why below—because fundamentally, the WGA is probably the last standing union that professionalizes writing.
At first, I was like: wait, don’t TV writers make a pretty good living? By most standards in the United States, and given the WGA’s guidelines, a television writer makes variably between $147,000-$36,000 a 10-episode season per show they work on. This is a middle-class wage for skilled work anywhere in the country. But since most writers (probably the vast majority of whom are at or below that level in the US) would have to live in NYC and LA, that amount quickly becomes not a living wage at all. Prominent showrunners like Damon Lindelof, Noah Hawley, Shonda Rhimes, and Ryan Murphy can live anywhere. And do. I know Noah Hawley lived in LA for about four years before moving to Austin, Texas, and I bet his six or seven-figure salary for FX/HULU/Disney goes a long way in Austin, TX.
Here’s the basic overview of the issue.
Check out X-Men writer Gerry Duggan’s photos from the first day of the strike.
ONE—NPR on strike. This is better than the Daily’s deep dive, which was pretty dismissive of the whole issue. Probably because many journalists are bitter that what is currently happening to screenwriters happened to journalists about twenty years ago. And the studios and media conglomerates won in that case.
TWO—John Warner makes the case that the above is true, which explains journalism and higher education as former safe havens for creative writers.
THREE—On the truly and consistently excellent OtherPPL podcast, Dave Eggers verifies this point because he plays in so many mediums.
FOUR—John August’s Script Notes gives a good deep dive into what it’s like on the ground of the strike and what they’re explicitly fighting for. But like everything else, it misses the point—that screenwriting is colossally hard to get into in the first place. August gets that—it’s why Scriptnotes exists in the first place—but what he and the other screenwriters don’t get is screenwriting is not an end in and of itself. It hasn’t been for a long time. August knows that—given his propensity for talking about writing and writing young adult novels. But what I don’t get from him is the realization that most practical pro writers dip their fingers into other mediums to supplement their income because it makes very little financial sense to put all their cards into one trade—explicitly screenwriting. Screenwriting is, ostensibly, the last-standing career for creative writers. The vast majority of working writers don’t even get screen projects off the ground, so from a financial and practical sense, trying to make a career as just a screenwriter, a novelist, or a journalist is a thing of the past. And the reason, I suspect, that most professional creative writers aim for a gig in film and tv is because of the WGA and its excellent health insurance, as the awesome Mary HK Choi reports.
FIVE—Most practical writers play in a lot of mediums. Those writers write novels, journalism, and comics because those professional writing mediums have become what is essentially a given now—a gig economy. They’re treated like Uber drivers. Writers like Roxane Gay, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Dave Eggers, Ben Percy, Sloane Crosley, and Charles Soule. None of them work in one writing medium because that is no way to make a living as a writer anymore. Those days are gone. The WGA is fighting for a living wage to show that this is skilled labor, but in my opinion, this battle has already been lost psychologically. So what can you do to support writers while a significant source of revenue is gone, and their health insurance?! Buy their books.
From My Notes.
Why is the strike so critical? Because if the WGA does not win, corporate America has successfully won the argument that writing is a hobby and not a professional trade. How many Ph.D. or MFAs are in English, professional writing, and fiction writing? Twice as many as there are jobs. It’s not valued. That’s why higher education has gone away as a stabilizing aspect for professional writers—that’s why there’s the adjunctification of those of us there because a living wage isn’t in higher education or the field we majored in! Most of us can forget about making a consistent living as a writer. And no, the solution is not a Substack because Patreon has been doing what Substack has done for ten years. The only way you make a decent cash flow is if you already come with a pre-established audience from other mainstream media companies. For most of us, having a substack is the financial equivalent of beer money.
This is just the way this shitty country and its economy work. I need a drink after writing all of the above. Anybody else wants to join me?
Finally, the problem is not streaming or CHATGPT. It is the core psychological, cultural belief that the studios are backing up with their money—they (and most Americans, I’d say) believe that screenwriting—any creative writing—is unskilled work because the vast majority of people in the workplace have a bachelors degree from an accredited university and that to do so, they must be able to write competently. It’s viewed as unskilled labor because most employers don’t see it as anything of value in the first place. And it doesn’t matter how many writers like August and others say it is professional and it does deserve a living wage and that survival is fucking insufficient. Everyone can do it if they get through college, they say. This a straw man argument. John Warner would probably agree; he wrote a book called Why They Can’t Write—because the vast majoring of college graduates can’t!
The second thing is the studios, and most employers, don’t care about creative writing or original thinking. What they care about is competence. Homogenization. Crowd-pleasing. Their excuse is the market (from higher education to journalism to novelists and screenwriters) has become saturated with writers, so they cannot afford to pay writers. They care about C-level writing. Not A+ writing that people like Eggers, Percy, and the rest can provide. Because at the end of the day, in the studio and modern media’s mindset, writing is a hobby, not a skilled labor.
There’s not a thing that the WGA can do to change that mindset. But suppose the WGA loses the strike. In that case, we can all forget about professional writing as any career outside of advertising and marketing and firmly entrench writing film screenplays and novels in the role of woodworking and blacksmithing—not a job, but a hobby.
This hobbyification of creative writing will have a downstream effect on the value of entertainment and critical thought and fundamentally change our ability to use reason and communicate differences between people, and that’s when we’ll begin to lose our mental and physical well-being.
Noah Hawley (who is also a novelist) says we already are.
So what can we do to help these folks? Buy their books.
I’ve started a collection in Bookshop featuring some of the writers mentioned in this article, but it is in no way a complete list. I’ll keep adding new ones to the list as they come up, but if there’s one missing that you think should be included, let me know.
Cheers,
Dave
Listening to As You Wish by Murder by Death