You have agency. Use it.

Large swaths of the creative industry rely on making writers feel helpless. Don’t let them.

Before I start, I want to emphasise that this post is written from the perspective of an outsider. I have no experience within the TV/film industry and can only discuss my perception of what’s going on. If I’m wrong, and I’d quite like to be wrong, please leave a comment. 

This week’s newsletter was prompted by Episode 151 of the Just Get A Real Job podcast, in which host Jamie Mackinlay talks to screenwriter Philip Ralph about the state of the TV industry. They cover a lot of topics, but the bit about ‘magical thinking’ towards the end really resonated with me.

I’ve touched on agency before, but I want to really focus now on the way that parts of the creative industry actively strip away writers’ sense of agency and what we can do to inoculate ourselves against it. 

Philip talks about how pervasive magical thinking is in the TV/film industry, this idea that “you've just got to keep going and you'll get there”. “There” is never really defined, but it looks a lot like winning the lottery. 

Philip and Jamie are right to say that one antidote to this is to love the writing process. I’ve said that myself many times and I do genuinely believe it. But loving the process on its own is not enough. We also have to acknowledge that the creative industries have developed structures that encourage writers and artists to feel helpless, because that power imbalance works for them. 

Let’s take an example from TV/film. Getting into that industry as a writer has never been easy, and it’s become much harder in recent years as the streamers cut budgets. Advice on what an early career writer should do to break in is often based on the advice-giver’s direct experience, so most of it isn’t relevant to anyone else. Listen to enough such advice and you’ll find that most of it conflicts. 

Unlike book publishing, there are no agents who’ll help you break in — you get your TV agent when you’ve already been produced, not in order to get produced. And most producers don’t take unsolicited scripts, so there’s no easy, or even just moderately difficult, route in there either.

There are a few open script calls from places like the BBC or Channel 4 which offer mentoring and support to the winners, but there are thousands of people competing for a handful of places. I’d liken it to the lottery, but in this case, if you win, you still aren’t rich, aren’t guaranteed any kind of job or income, and will probably still never get your own ideas made. 

Yet, hang around the industry long enough and you’ll eventually hear someone in a position of power telling the most innocent-sounding story about how they are working closely with, let’s say, an actor who wants to write, but goshdarnit, he just doesn’t understand story structure. Whilst you’re standing there, you’re thinking, “I’m a writer. I understand story structure. And, omg, I understand character. And relationships. And all the shit you need to make a good story. Why can’t I get someone in your position to work closely with me?” 

At this point, someone else will pop up and say, “Ah, well, you just have to keep going. If your work is good enough, you’ll succeed.” 

Which is, of course, an outright lie. It’s the lie Philip talks about in the podcast. 

But it’s worse than that. Because this lie creates a gap between reality and perception, and into that gap the grifters slide. 

There’s an entire chunk of the industry that is devoted to parting desperate writers from their cash. Whether it’s crappy script competitions, bad script editors, or pointless courses, these grifts work because they look a lot like legitimate offerings. Open calls from legit studios, the really good script editors, the courses from people who know what they are talking about… all of these things can be easily mimicked by grifters, and they are. (I’ll note too that they are also mimicked by well-meaning but inexperienced people who genuinely want to help, but lack the skills to actually do so.)

One of the reasons that grift is so effective is that writers have so few legitimate options to progress their career. There is no career ladder to climb. You can’t get a job as an entry level writer and then get a promotion at your annual review. Success doesn’t lead to more success. Indeed, it can quite often lead instead to your career cratering for no apparent reason. Hard work does not always pay off. 

Grifters need you to feel helpless. If you felt like you had some modicum of control over your writing career, a lot of their offerings would simply not be attractive. You wouldn’t need “access to industry leaders”, or to pay to enter loads of script competitions, or to sink vast sums of money into courses that promise more than they can ever deliver. You would be far, far harder to extract cash from. So their marketing messages are all about making you feel that you need them, that without them you will fail. It’s not true, but they are very, very good at making it seem like it is.

The industry, on the other hand, doesn’t need you to feel helpless; helplessness is simply a byproduct of the way that they both maintain power and control, and maintain some level of sanity.

Let’s tackle the last part first. 

There are just so, so many writers who want to find a mass market outlet for their creativity. I know, I’m one of them. But a lot of these writers, the majority I’d say, are not ready. I’ve submitted scripts I knew weren’t quite there yet, and I’ve submitted scripts that I thought were but actually weren’t. So I don’t blame writers for submitting too early. 

But if you’re on the receiving end of all these scripts, well, I can’t imagine it’s an easy job. If access were unfettered, the deluge of unfinished, unpolished and downright shoddy scripts would be horrendous. There are so many more scripts and writers than there are opportunities that the process of finding new writers and ideas has to be constrained somehow. 

So open script calls by respectable studios have to be limited in some way — whether that’s by topic, genre, who can submit, or length of submission window — in order to cut numbers to the point where processing them all is feasible. The barriers are a self-defence mechanism. I’m not convinced they work very well, but I can see how they evolved to be what they are. 

These restrictions also maintain power and control, whether that’s individually or structurally. People with power work with less talented people they know, rather than take a punt on a stranger, because then they can keep everything within their existing sphere of influence. 

I don’t necessarily think they realise they are doing it — it’s just a natural reflex to want to maintain easy, familiar relationships over all the hard work required to create new ones. So your big-name writers are much more likely to get another big opportunity because the people who make decisions know them, trust them, and want to work with them. New writers, not so much. 

There are other people in the industry who promise more than they can deliver, perhaps because they bullshitted their way into their job and they’re going to carry on bullshitting until they die, perhaps because they are over-optimisitic, or perhaps because they’re codependent and struggle with the idea of disappointing others. Deliberately or not, they will string you along until you lose all hope and all sense of your own agency.

Again, what they are doing is attempting to maintain their own power, or even just a sense that they have some power. These people are the mesopredators of the TV/film industry, to borrow an ecological term. They are both predator and prey. They are vulnerable to being fired or losing their status because of the decisions of the people above them, but they are also looking for ways to exploit more vulnerable people below them.

I’ve seen people getting trapped in relationships with mesopredators and it’s messy. Promises that are never fulfilled. Ghosting. Punting decisions down the road to some future deadline and leaving you hanging in the meantime. Passing off your ideas as their own. Promising that they can get big names involved, even though they can’t. These people exist in every industry, but they have an outsized impact in the creative industries precisely because there are so, so many desperate and naïve people around to take advantage of.

And there are bigger structural problems as well. Structural barriers like the sexism, racism and classism that we know exists because of all the stats and first-person stories that illuminate them. Structural barriers like not paying for project development time, or paying per screen minute rather than time worked, or hiring an individual writer on a per episode basis rather than hiring a writer’s room to do the whole series. Structural barriers like demanding a credit before hiring a writer — how do new writers get credits if no one will hire them? Structural barriers like not having training-ground programmes like Doctors where new writers could cut their teeth. Structural barriers like not having writers on set so that they can learn more about their craft. Structural barriers like not having clear, accessible and sensible routes in. 

So, so many structural barriers. Dismantling them would take firstly an acknowledgement of the problem, and secondly money and effort to fix. I don’t see that happening any time soon, largely because there’s no motivation for the incumbents to do so. The way things are works well for them, and the rest of us have no power to effect change.

All of these barriers contribute to the feelings of helplessness that we writers feel. 

What can we do? 

The first thing that every writer needs to realise is that you have agency. You are not helpless. 

You might not be able to rustle up a lottery win or a commission, but are are other things you can do: 

Reject magical thinking

We all have a dream to get our series commissioned, for it to be a huge hit, and for life to suddenly become easy. But you must accept that you will not win the lottery, you will not be the person who bucks the trend, and you will not succeed simply because you persisted.

The industry is fickle, unpredictable and volatile. If you can be happy colouring between those lines, then have at it, but if such an uncertain, risky and unstable industry brings you out in hives, you should look for an easier creative outlet. 

As soon as you reject the dream, you can put your energies into creating a life that nourishes you, pays your bills and leaves you room to write. Put that first.

Focus on what you can control

There are so many aspects to being a writer that lie outside of your control. Recognise them, then ignore them and focus on what you can control. 

Don’t rush

If a script competition or open call has a deadline that you can’t hit, make an informed decision about what’s best for you. You don’t have to submit a half-baked script; you have the agency to say no. 

Learn to discern

Which script competitions are grift, and which are worth entering? Do your background research and consider whether paid competitions are worth the money. You will likely not win, so what else could that money have paid for that would bring you genuine benefits? 

Be careful of courses

There are so many courses out there that you could do, and you could spend your life and your life’s savings twice over doing them. So always ask yourself whether you really need to do a course, whether it’s going to fill a vital gap in your knowledge, or whether you’re just suffering from a dose of FOMO. And again, ask yourself what else that money could pay for?

Learn to love your “No”

In fact, you should always, always be ready to say no. If you’re talking to a production company and are getting bad vibes from them, say no. If someone has an opportunity that smells wrong, say no. If a competition seems like grift, say no. 

“No” is your most powerful asset. Saying “No” asserts your agency. “No” is your friend.

The more you focus on developing your sense of agency, the more secure you will feel and the more resilience you will build. The road will be just as long and winding and unpredictable as it ever was, but you will travel it with more equanimity and you may even find yourself stumbling across better opportunities exactly because you aren’t thrashing around in desperation. 

You are not helpless. Don’t let anyone make you feel as if you are.