David Barnett
Fri, 5 May 2023
Writers in America have put down their pens and picked up their placards. Well, who isn’t on strike these days? And writers aren’t exactly doctors, teachers, train drivers, or paramedics, are they? It’s not as if what they do is actually that important.
Obviously, being a writer, I’m going to argue against that. Because, on some level, perhaps writers are all those things. Their work heals. It educates. A book or movie or TV show can transport you to another world, or just away from this one. And writers can, through their work, sometimes actually save lives.
The Writers Guild of America has embarked upon its strike action after the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers refused to meet with them to discuss new contractual terms.
The landscape, particularly in television, has changed considerably over the last few years. The WGA wants new pay structures to take into account the rise of streaming services, guaranteed periods of work for staff writers, and discussions about the threat of Artificial Intelligence.
But does anyone outside of TV, or Hollywood, or publishing really care about writers? As someone once said to me when I bemoaned some fact or other about the writer’s life: well, at least you’re not digging ditches for a living, are you?
To be fair, neither was he. But I take his point. We see the ditch-digger, toiling at his work. We see the paramedics, racing down the street. We see the doctors, and the train drivers, and all those other professions that, quite rightly, demand and deserve more pay and better conditions.
Writers are invisible creatures, and save for those whose books top the bestseller lists, or are our particular favourites, we barely know their names. Who wrote the last movie you enjoyed? Who writes the Netflix show you binged? Who wrote Dennis the Menace in this week’s Beano? Who wrote the song that’s at the top of the charts or the video game that was on everyone’s Christmas gift list?
Almost everything we enjoy begins with a writer. If it’s not on the page, it’s not on the stage, as the old theatre adage goes. Being a writer is a sought-after profession; in theory, at least. Everyone has a book in them, we are told, and most of them think it should be published.
And yet, though we are surrounded by the end-product of the writer’s work – though almost everything we read or watch or listen to has, at its genesis, been written – we seem to vastly undervalue it.
The average annual earnings of a professional author in the UK are, according to the last survey commissioned by the UK Authors Licensing and Collecting Society, around £7,000.
Last month the publishing trade magazine The Bookseller published a report in which new authors felt abandoned and betrayed by publishers who they say failed to put any support or marketing behind new books.
Many readers will not even countenance buying a new novel unless it is reduced to 99p in one of Amazon’s Kindle e-book promotions. A distressingly large number (going off the websites I see my own books advertised on) are more than happy to download them free from pirate sites, with no recompense to author or publisher.
Events and festivals invite writers along to appear on panels or moderate discussions with little or no payment, feeling that the exposure is good enough, no matter how many times they are shamed on social media and told that exposure doesn’t pay mortgages or put food on the table.
Writers rarely complain, at least not in public, because for most of us it has been a long hard, ascent to being paid for what they love doing. And it is a precarious position – one book with poor sales away from tumbling back down, one TV show cancelled because it didn’t get requisite views in its first month on streaming away from starting the whole process again.
And the industry itself does not care, because any writer who does achieve those dizzy heights only needs to look down and see the endless stream of writers crawling up behind, eager for work.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, along comes AI. Executives who pay writers are, in all seriousness, asking why they need humans at all, when a few choice instructions to ChatGPT might get them the next box office hit rom-com.
Which, of course, it won’t, because technology cannot replicate the mysterious spark of creativity that bursts like a supernova in the writer’s brain and births something shiny and new, forged with humanity and heart. At least, not yet.
So more power to the striking writers of the WGA. They don’t do this lightly; the last time there was industrial action by America’s film and TV writers was 2007, when it went on for 14 weeks.
And if you think it won’t affect you directly, watch how quickly the US topical talk shows go off-air, then just hope that the producers of your favourite TV series have their scripts already in the bag for shooting over summer, or you might find that next season you’re looking forward to binging is a little later than planned.
TV, like nature, abhors a vacuum. They’ll fill the schedules with something while the writers are on strike. The last action 15 years ago led directly to the rise of reality TV as networks scrambled to fill airtime with entertainment that didn’t need to be professionally scripted.
So, be warned. The writer’s work might not really be a matter of life and death, but it surely enhances our lives in ways most of us often don’t consider. Value writing, and pay writers, what they’re worth. Which, when you really stop and think about it, is their weight in gold.
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