PENCILS DOWN: WRITERS' STRIKE

This blog is about professional scriptwriting, emphasis on the "professional." So it's appropriate at this time to temporarily shelve the writing tips and focus on the most important and biggest labor action by professional screenwriters in more than two decades.

In case you've been living in a soundproof closet, The Writers Guilds of America, East and West, are on strike.

I'm going to use this blog to chronicle the experience on a personal level.

When the strike began four days ago, David Carr of the New York Times ran a piece that focused, not on the gravity and facts of the situation, but on the apparently amusing aspect of a strike by bespectacled wan writers, as if cartoon moles had emerged from their burrows for the first time in years to squint at the sunlight and wave wooden signs.

I wrote Mr. Carr and, to my pleasant surprise, received a prompt reply. The email exchange follows.

Do I detect a lightly mocking note of disdain in your piece on the strike? As a former writer-reporter (BusinessWeek, Newsweek, UPI), I appreciate the color in your article. But this is a multimillion-dollar industry that drives the image of the United States around the world, and I find myself without an income today. I don't really see what lattes and artsy glasses have to do with it, nor the repeated insinuations that this is not like a "real" strike, and that no one has a vaguest notion of what it's about. It's about the livelihoods of thousands of writers and tens of thousands in related businesses.

Write a little less -- report a little more.

You are the third person to say this in feedback, so I think I must have crossed some line in there. I really appreciate you taking the time to write and will keep this and other notes in mind next time I step up to the strike.

david

Mr. Carr did not discard the purple prose in the next online iteration of the article. But it was couched in a good deal more perspective, an acknowledgment that the situation will impact, not just the thousands of writers involved and the tens of thousand of persons in businesses related to scriptwriting, but the millions who watch TV and movies. Readers of the article came away with a more accurate conclusion, that this is the real thing.

Real thing indeed. Today, thousands of professional scriptwriters are massing at the gates of Fox Studios in a show of strength.

Please watch the news, keep up on the situation, talk about it with friends and enemies, honk when you see us picketing.

And by all means, please comment on this post, asking any questions you may have about this admittedly arcane issue and offering any comments you may have, pro, con or otherwise. I say to you what any strike captain might say to his minions: If I don't hear you, I don't know you're out there.

Thanks. More to come.