Why We Need Writers

I recently watched Drew Gooden’s excellent commentary on the Writers Guild of America strike. Near the end of the video, he said “writing will not be a viable career path much longer,” and it has echoed in my head like a bad movie sequence ever since. Waves crash in the background, distorted visuals of a forest canopy swirl across the screen, and a deep voice echoes in surround sound: Writing will not be a viable career path much longer. . . Writing will not be a viable career path much longer. . . Panic sets in. Writing hasn’t been a viable career path for me yet. I need more time. I need more time!

Writers are facing an existential crisis. As humans become uncomfortably similar to the populace in Fahrenheit 451, I think we should all be rereading Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel. Jeffrey Somer’s article Why Fahrenheit 451 Will Always Be Terrifying calls out our “shortening attention spans, training us to seek constant thrills and instant gratification.” Yeah, that sounds like me.

This strike is not just for screenwriters. We, the audience, need writers to fight against the corporations bent on pumping endless shiny drivel into our eye sockets until we become a dystopian mass of numb, tractable minds. It is troubling how the exact industry Ray Bradbury censured in Fahrenheit 451 is suffocating writers. Somer calls the book “a dark mirror of our modern age where unchallenging entertainment is available to us at all times, on devices we carry with us at all times, ready and waiting to drown out any input we don’t want to hear.” If that constantly available entertainment is both unchallenging and overstimulating, our brains will have no space nor fodder for complex thought.

But more on books and overconsumption in my next post. First I want to talk about the strike.

If you’re not keeping up, the WGA is striking after failed negotiations with major studios. The strike started on May 2, and demands include higher wages and limitations on AI. Gooden’s video goes into greater depth, but this is my takeaway: as we consume more and more, writers get paid less and less.

According to the WGA, “Median weekly writer-producer pay has declined 4% over the last decade. Adjusting for inflation, the decline is 23%.” But not only are writers getting paid less per week, they’re also working less weeks per job. Writer Amanda Mercedes links the issue to the new model of streaming services.

With traditional TV models, jobs were lasting six months, nine months, a year. I saw a writer the other day that said that her last job was four weeks, and that’s just not sustainable to be able to string together gigs in that way to make a living.

Anyone can imagine how difficult it is to get a gig as a writer; now imagine you finally get one, and it lasts only for a month. So why are these gigs becoming so short?

Well, the corporations that the WGA failed negotiations with are the ones that own big streaming services, and they have decided that writers aren’t that important for production. In cable TV, writer stay around for almost 70% of production time. In streaming, writers are gone before the show is even half made.

As Eliza Clark puts it in How to Be a Writer on Set, “the script is a living document.” When the script writers are finished, they have made something complicated and breathing; in the same way that you cannot know a person fully by looking at them, or even by listening to them, no one outside of that writers’ room will grasp all the intricacies of the story. She gives a great example of the kind of role a writer serves on set:

Say you wrote a scene where [your characters] happen upon a farmhouse. You know that that farmhouse needs to have been owned by a certain kind of person, have certain things about it that will come back into the story later. Some of those things might be indicated by your script, and some may not. You are the one who knows that in episode 9, that farmhouse is the site of an epic battle in a cornfield (or whatever), so you know that it needs to have a cornfield.

If you cut a writer out of the process, it may work out short term, and might save a little money at first, but you end with continuity errors later on. And those? You either ignore them and annoy your audience, or you do reshoots and spend more time and money than you saved in the first place.

Cutting writers out of the production process ignores what makes art so awesome. It is not a recipe card, but a expression of humanity. Writing (whether it’s a poem, a novel, or a screenplay) is about the unsaid. Lazar would say “write around it” — it being the core meaning of your story. If you want to tell your reader about your experience with depression, you can’t open a word document and type I have depression. I cry everyday. That is not art!

Instead, maybe, you write a novel about a girl who tries so hard to be perfect that she forgets who she actually is. That subtlety is beautiful because it allows your reader to interpret your art. Their own experiences influence how they understand the unsaid. While that story is about depression for me, it may be a story about grief for someone else.

With a screenplay, the unsaid has practical implications. With so many people working on a show, someone has to be sure about what story that show will tell. Writers talk through all the script’s subtext in the tone meeting. In Clark’s advice for running a tone meeting, she says:

And another thing: it can sometimes feel a little crazy to highlight something that feels completely obvious to you, but remember: the director was not in the writers room.

How can these shows execute any storytelling without the people who wrote the story? However straightforward a story may seem, there is always subtext. The subtext is only obvious to the writer.

I’ve seen crippled story in so many shows lately, especially adaptations of existing material. We end up with shows that look awesome — great cinematography, costume design, and sets; with a strong aesthetic and slick post-production — but have abysmal writing. And how could it be good? If your show is pulling different writers in for a few weeks at a time and expecting them to write a show that is cohesive and suspenseful, it will probably only be good on mute.

And you what isn’t going to fix those story problems? Artificial intelligence. I don’t even know how to address the AI issue because it’s so obvious to me why AI can’t replace writers. I agree with Gooden’s long commentary on it. Here are a few excerpts from his video.

[The WGA is] fighting to keep AI out of the writer's room altogether, because as much as Silicon Valley tech bros look at ChatGPT with dollar signs in their eyes, it completely undermines writers, and really the entire point of art in the first place.

AI does not create original ideas, because it can't. It doesn't have unique life experience or a sense of humor that it can draw upon. It is a glorified search engine that just plagiarizes a bunch of elements of already existing human creations, and regurgitates it onto a Word document.

I like watching TV and movies because they're a celebration of human creativity. I wanna see people tell stories about their lives, or turn hard times into art, because it's incredible that it's even possible to do that. And when you see something that resonates with you, and speaks to a part of you that you've never quite been able to put into words, and makes you feel emotions, like, that's that good shit.

Even if AI becomes capable of writing a good script, consider this: Clark says the writer’s job on set is to protect the story. If a script was written by AI, who is going to fight for it?

The WGA closed their strike announcement with these words:

The studios’ responses to our proposals have been wholly insufficient, given the existential crisis writers are facing. The companies' behavior has created a gig economy inside a union workforce, and their immovable stance in this negotiation has betrayed a commitment to further devaluing the profession of writing.

I support the writers striking. I’m tired of watching beautiful shows with incoherent stories. And I certainly don’t want art to be mathematically optimized for the average human. I want to slow down. I want to read more, think more, and choose my digital entertainment more carefully. I want to support the shows and movies that tell meaningful stories — emotional, thought-provoking, and controversial ones. I want to commune, perhaps, more than consume.

Good luck to the WGA, and to artists everywhere. We’re in this existential crisis together.