Editors note: Some comments were edited for length and clarity. When the Writers Guild of America went on strike on Tuesday, May 2nd, authors were right there with them. Some joined the picket lines as card-carrying Guild members; some put projects they’d had in development with major studios on indefinite hold; some jumped into their group chat to make sure they were doing all they could to hold the line. Some, even, turned to their own organizing spaces to consider how to be in deeper solidarity with their fellow workers. Because that’s the thing: writers are workers, whether they’re collaborating on a TV show in a writers room, trucking away at a novel alone in their home office, or hopping on a Google Doc (hi!) to report on both. So if anyone outside the WGA is going to understand why it matters to stand in solidarity with screenwriters as they strike not just for better working conditions, but for the very existence of writing as a real career, it’s other writers. “I’ve seen a lot of solidarity from fiction writers, prose writers, with the WGA,” says author Steph Cha, who’s been a Guild member since 2019 (the same year her most recent novel, Your House Will Pay , came out). “And I think part of that is it feels like the same battle—where the work that we do, because it is also an art form and it is also personally satisfying, gets treated like it’s not work. I love writing TV, but it’s very much a job. Yes, it’s a craft. Yes, it’s a passion. But it is also work, and I think it’s valuable to have that work protected.” “I’ve always been really interested in how people not get screwed while trying to write,” says Maureen Johnson, an author (most recently of Nine Liars fame) who’s not in the WGA but was in the middle of talks on a new Hollywood project when the strike hit. “It’s a business in which it’s very easy to just be crushed. You’re always one week away from disaster. I have some […]
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