We’ve all heard the old not-funny line about the actress was so new to Hollywood that she slept with the screenwriter. The writer! So unimportant! That’s hilarious! (It’s less hilarious than ever in these days of Harvey Weinstein and his ilk, but that’s not my focus here.)
Without the writing—and the writer—we we wouldn’t have the movie to begin with. Or the sitcom, or the TV drama, or even the ads during those shows. Someone writes what all those anchors read on our insane 24-hour news cycle. Without the writer, we wouldn’t have novels, of course, or news of any perspective. We would live in a world without “content.” There’s a whole world that needs to be filled with words, over and over and over again.
Matt Wallace—screenwriter, novelist, and former wrestler—wrote a powerful piece about why the writing is important, why writers should never back down on getting paid, and, best of all, exactly how writers can respond to requests to work for free or cheap.
Read Matt’s rant and rebuttal guide here. The first part is angry-funny and NSFW. The second part, the how-to advice, is solid as a rock. You have value; your creative work has value. Even, or maybe especially, that mundane writing that just needs to get done has value. Don’t believe anyone who says otherwise, especially if they’re asking you to write for them. Matt equips us with calm and professional responses to people asking writers to work for exposure (as a friend of mine says, “Exposure is something you die of”), for peanuts, or for pity.
* Disclaimer: I have wonderful clients who value my work and pay on time. Rarely do people ask me to write for free (my mom gets a pass) but a lot of writers in a lot of fields get pressured to work for little or nothing, as if writing was so easy (no) and so insignificant (also no) that it’s not worth much.