Since I have a few minutes, I want to speak to my fellow TV writers out there who endured yet another staffing/upfronts season and unfortunately did *not* land a staff job. Here we go.
First, I’m gonna assume you did everything you were supposed to do. You wrote a killer pilot (maybe more than one), you aced every meeting, and you got great feedback on those meetings from your reps. And yet. No gig.
Your friends got staffed. Your enemies got staffed. Everybody’s happy but you’re miserable. Trust me, I’ve been there.
The good news is, despite all the attention this time of year gets, staff jobs open up ALL the time. You could be unemployed today but working in a writers’ room in a month. Or two months. Or literally tomorrow.
That’s the maddening part about being a freelancer: there’s just no telling when or if the next job will come along. The waiting is torture, but it’s also an occupational hazard. Not everybody’s cut out for it.
If you are, here’s my unsolicited advice: take a week to cycle through your own personal Stages of Grief. Maybe two. But that’s it. Two weeks. NO LONGER. After that? Get your ass back up.
It’s okay to feel bad. You worked hard and shit didn’t pan out. But you’re you’re NOT gonna do is wallow in those feelings forever.
So take your two weeks. And then start writing a new pilot. It’s the one tangible thing you can control.
It doesn’t matter if you’re not in the mood. It doesn’t matter if you don’t feel inspired. GET IN THE MOOD. THAT’S YOUR JOB.
The single most important survival tool in your arsenal is your willingness to stay in the game. You can *feel* like quitting as long as you don’t quit.
Keep writing. Keep taking meetings. Take a day job if you have to. Pay your bills. Do whatever you gotta do to stay afloat. Just don’t let a bad staffing season get you down.
Literally the worst thing you can do after not getting staffed is to stop writing for an extended period of time. Avoid that temptation at all costs.
Your task right now is to keep your skills sharp so that you’re ready when that job offer eventually comes.
But if you allow yourself to tap out before that happens? Trust and believe that someone else will happily take the job that was meant to be yours.
So like I said: stay in the game. Keep honing your craft. Because here’s what all those networks, studios, and showrunners will never admit: they need us more than we need them.
Shows NEED writers. Who else is gonna write all these goddamn scripts? If network executives could do it themselves, they would. But they can’t. That’s where we come in.
Sooner or later, the tide will turn and you’ll take a meeting that results in an actual job offer. But you can’t take that meeting if you’re too demoralized to get out of bed. Shake it off and get back to work.
Okay, that was way longer than I intended it to be, but I hope someone out there found it useful.
