On May 3, 2019, I received a push notification informing me that Shawn Ryan had mentioned me in a tweet. I'd never met Shawn. I'd admired his work, and had been in the same room as him at Guild events, but I don't think we'd ever shaken hands, let alone spoken. Shawn was participating in the "WGA Solidarity Challenge," created by Javi Grillo-Marxuach, had read a pilot I'd written, and liked it enough to tweet about it.
I wasn't working on staff at the time, and I wasn't being paid for any my development. Knowing that a script of mine had impressed a writer of Shawn's caliber, reputation, and experience meant everything. It said: keep writing. Things may not be working out right now, but keep going.
Every writer has these moments in their career.
To pay this boost forward, I opened my DMs to writers working on support staffs, who now aspirationally use the term "PreWGA." Over the last year, I've continued to read these writers and, when impressed, I tweet. Some weeks, I get to one script (Javi's initial challenge asked upper-level writers to commit to reading one script per week). Sometimes, because I'm really deep in a project, it's just one a month.
Honestly, during this pandemic, reading and connecting with these writers is the thing that lifts my mood and fulfills me more than any other.
Though the WGA Solidarity Challenge has been retired, it's not as though writers suddenly stopped reading other writers, or tweeting about scripts that impressed them.
What I want to do is take the core conceit of this amazing grassroots idea — writers reading and boosting writers — and turn it into a formal, official Guild program. We won't use the boosts from the WGA Solidarity Challenge, as those readers didn't sign up for something officially associated with Guild. But we ought to make this kind of community uplift part of our culture, our collective mentorship efforts.
So, let's put together a database that connects writers to upper-level writers who are willing to donate their time, much in the same way the Platform allows writers to look for producers and executives who say they're open to general meetings. Then let's publish any resulting boosts into a document accessible by showrunners, producers, and executives to help put writers on their radars.
