Imagine having to write with a giant ticking bomb under your chair. Tick. Tick. Tick. What if you had to write with Annie Wilkes from Misery in the room? A third scenario: you have to write with everyone you love shackled to the wall. Held hostage. By psychotic gangsters.
The allegories above represent an average writer’s life. The studio and its executives. The fans and their hopes. The bank and the bills. Being a writer in the entertainment industry is ruthless at best. Getting started as a writer — breaking in, as we say — feels impossible. It takes time to learn the craft, more time to learn how writers actually make money, and even more still to learn how productions work. Then there’s the writing itself. This is a job that drains all of your time.
Yet time is the very resource that most people with disabilities lack, and this is the simplest answer to why Hollywood isn’t opening doors for us.
The U.S. government defines disability as "the inability to do any substantial gainful activity by reason of any medically determinable physical or mental impairment which can be expected to result in death or which has lasted or can be expected to last for a continuous period of not less than 12 months."
Translation: you have a permanent condition that prevents you from working a standard job. This doesn’t apply to screenwriters or freelancers, or to people who flip customized basketball shoes on Instagram. The question amounts to, "When you run out of money, can you pull 40 hours at McDonald’s like everyone else?" Can they find you work with minimal training? If the answer is no and your condition is not temporary, you are considered disabled. And unless you want to lose your new (free) health benefits, that is where you are going to stay: prohibited from earning an income.
If this applies to you — and it does to me — you probably aren’t going to be covering set or assigned to a staff; not unless you’re the financier or executive in charge. What if this doesn’t apply to you, though? Maybe you were born with a condition that requires you to use a wheelchair or crutches. Maybe you are susceptible to harrowing physical ordeals, such as migraines. Maybe you have partial hearing or vision loss. In these scenarios, you are capable of working and you want to work, but you need a little help. You just have a slight medical issue to go along with all that writing talent.
So what’s the catch? Hollywood isn’t looking for writers. I’ll repeat it: Hollywood isn’t looking for writers. They are looking for writing. They are hiring the people best suited to produce the greatest quantity of writing at the best available quality. If we’re talking features, a producer needs to know you can crank out draft after draft, after polish, after draft. If we’re talking about staffing a show, your first duties will be to the team — from making coffee to taking meticulous notes to breaking the story then re-breaking and re-breaking and breaking it all down again — before anyone is asked to type a single formatted word. You have to bring your A-game all day, all night, and again. You will not go to church. You will not see your pets. Eating and sleeping are fantasies. It’s like being at sea.
In every conversation I have ever had with a producer, executive, or showrunner about the nature of hiring a writer, I always hear the same three precepts.
One: It’s all about the writing. You either can do it or you can’t, and most aren’t as good as they believe they are.
Two: It’s also about who you know. Networking. They have to trust you from moment one. Having a winning personality is a huge part of the equation.
Three: No giving up. A huge percentage of writers needed years to break in. This can mean 30, 40 fully written scripts and triple the number of drafts, polishes, screwups. The only way to get better at writing is to keep writing.
Thus it all comes back to time. A person with one or more disabilities must meet those three challenges like any and every writer. It might take us a bit longer, and the road might be more difficult, but the prize remains there at journey’s end.
I asked David H. Steinberg and Alexander Woo — both showrunners — for their take on support staff positions such as writer’s and showrunner’s assistants (both of whom, by the way, are totally open to the idea of hiring an openly disabled writer).
Steinberg, co-creator-executive producer of No Good Nick on Netflix says, “WA is such a tough job, it’s going to sound crazy but I would only hire someone who had done it before. Basically, I need someone who’s organized and can take great notes, capturing the important stuff without getting bogged down by the irrelevant stuff."
Woo, co-creator-executive producer of The Terror: Infamy and currently developing at Netflix says, "There's no set process for hiring a WA. Usually, they come from personal connections of one of the writers, producers, or someone else connected with the show. Often they have filled another support staff position. For me, the most important skill is the ability to compile notes in a way that is organized and readable. This is nowhere near as easy as it sounds."
The message couldn’t be clearer: you must be able to take notes! Structure. Story analysis. Character. Backstory. Beats. Breakdowns. To be in the most entry-level position on a television show, you better be versed in the components of dramatic writing. You need to have memorized everything from Aristotle’s Poetics to Lajos Egri to Joseph Campbell. You must know the basic differences between three acts, five acts — even six acts. You have to be fluent in the lingo and how it applies: conflict, stakes, wounds. You'll know how to make a story more digestible and formulaic. You’ll also know how to make a story different and unique.
Oops, I forgot to mention you also need to know how to write loglines, short synopses and long ones, outlines, full treatments, and of course detailed coverage and critiques of the other writers’ works. There’s also the painstaking research; a character gets a deadly disease and you need to put together a briefing for the entire room on its symptoms, treatments, lifestyle impact, and real testimonials from those afflicted. You need to be a detective, a journalist, a spy, and at times, a great liar. You need to be the biggest fan in the show’s universe; the keeper of every detail and nuance.
When you can do all of that, you can begin.
David Radcliff, chair of the Writers Guild of America, West’s Disabled Writers Committee, has more of the gory details.
"Only 0.7% of WGA writers are openly disabled, which suggests there are significant barriers for entry — both structural and social — into the business for disabled writers."
His best advice for pre-WGAW writers?
" ... since employment bias is likely to limit opportunities for an openly disabled person to become an assistant, the best steps a disabled writer can take is to network laterally with other up-and-coming writers. Form relationships, online and off. Take up interests that are not writing, so you'll have more to talk about in meetings. Send your work to reputable contests like the Austin Film Festival to get it in front of more eyes. And think outside of the television sphere, because media is changing so much. It's possible starting a YouTube channel or a Twitch feed or writing a book could be the thing that gets you through the door."
What if your hours are limited?
"This is a tricky question to answer because television work is, by nature, both mentally and physically taxing — and because there are so few disabled people in these spaces already, it will take some time before the landscape changes to our benefit. Post-COVID, some rooms are now only working half-days, so talk with your representation (once you get it) to try to look for rooms that aren't going to run long. But if you're on a network TV show, you can expect to work an eight-hour workday or longer. And if you're on set in production, expect to have some 14-hour days."
Liz Hsiao Lan Alper is one of the administrators of a program designed to train those who identify as BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, those over the age of 50, or those with one or more disabilities as writer’s assistants or script coordinators. The program, in partnership with the Writers Guild Foundation, is called the Writers’ Access Support Staff Training Program. There is another shoe about to drop, though: the program has been such a smashing success that they’ve received more than 2,000 applications for the first cycle!
Alper explains, "Writer's assistants and script coordinators are crucial support staff positions in the writers room. Writer's assistants are responsible for taking notes in the room as the writers break, re-break, trash, break new story, and re-break that story (repeat as needed). They are often walking encyclopedias of the show they work on. They're also tasked with research for stories, tracking storylines, etc. [Script coordinators] proofread scripts and ... coordinate and distribute the script and all subsequent changes to network, studio, and all departments. They field questions about the episode from departments and track clearances, etc. during pre-production."
With these jobs comes a lot of responsibility.
"Learning how to do the job efficiently and effectively in such a short period of time is tough! So the program is an in-depth course on how this all works," she said.
"The intent is to set our underrepresented candidates up for success so they can go into the writers room on Day One confident that they know what they're doing. [Obviously] nothing is better than hands-on experience, but we hope that this program will help! Especially for our disabled candidates, who already face a lot of hardships and lack of opportunity in our industry."
In conclusion, the deck is stacked against new writers, and this rings doubly true for those with disabilities. Time itself is against us. Just a few weeks earlier, I said to a friend, "I’m fine writing [feature] specs, maybe pitching a few shows, but I doubt I’ll ever see the inside of a writers room unless I’m the EP. This is an abled-person's game. Even those with disabilities aren’t that disabled ... they are just able enough. I’m someone who loses a few days a week, and when you’re pulling 80-hour workweeks..."
His response was simply, "Then you have to make yourself that much more irreplaceable." He’s right. My writing has to be disproportionately awesome compared to anything else on the market, or I have no shot.
Never forget: there’s a giant ticking bomb under everyone else’s chair, too.