So a young writer emailed today with a situation I feel is all too common -

A reputable manager/producer contacted him to say that he loved his writing and wanted to work with him. The manager then sent a list of 3 ideas for the writer to consider.

Here was my advice to him - Obviously, this is an opportunity that can be ripe with free work pitfalls. The manager says "write this idea!" then suddenly it's four outlines and three drafts later and it's "sorry we're going another direction".

So how can you avoid getting taken for a ride?

I learned something today about WGA reacquisition that I wanted to pass along. It's an interesting but complicated process.

The basics - if you write sell or write an original project there is a window for you to reacquire the matierial if it falls out of active development. Theoretically you could even "buy it back" if you repaid all the monies the company paid for development.

But really what it means is you would get a shopping window with incredibly favorable turnaround terms for your project.

Hey so get a load of this...

I was informed today that the new jam in How Do Streamers Screw Over Writers is to reclassify productions to save money on residuals.

So that theatrical movie you developed for years and finally sold to Hulu? Sorry. It's a TV movie now! And by classifying it as a TV movie they get to pay out considerably less in residuals to you as a writer.

It's the same shit we see when the CW gets to pay substantially less for an hour's worth of TV.

It's the same product but by categorizing it, the writers gets screwed.

This inane "we hear/see" debate is just a smoke screen over the real issue at hand which is that screenwriting is not about writing it's about ideas. When you're a newer writer it's easy to fall into the trap that there are rules to the actual writing that are somehow keeping you back from succeeding.

That if you just "wrote more like a pro" you would somehow break through.

Coming off the conversation last night about the plague of free work I thought I'd offer some advice on how I try to avoid getting stuck in the muck on development and OWAs... Too often I hear about younger writers getting trapped in the endless cycles of phone calls and outline revisions and "it's almost there".

This is bad. This is a time waste. And it rarely, rarely leads to you being paid.

(It obviously happens, but I'm talking in general.)

Guys, something insane happened to me today.

I am on a text chain with my teenage nieces and nephews along with my mom (their grandma) and today my mom asked them if they knew who Helen Keller was...

And their response was that Helen Keller was a fraud who didn't exist. At first I thought they were trolling grandma, which is admittedly fun. But after awhile it was clear they weren't joking.

"How could someone be deaf and blind and learn how to write books?" My nephew admits she probably existed but was probably only one or the other.

A quick thread about the quote system, how much it sucks and how the studios are the real reason our wages are lower especially if you're not an A-list writer. For those who don't know -- the idea of the quote system is that when you book a job as a writer, that becomes your quote. Basically how much you get paid to do your job.

Then when you get hired the next time the studio asks for your quote and makes a slightly larger offer.

So as Hollywood shuts down for 2018 I thought I would leave you guys with some advice for younger writers in the New Year. The advice is a twist on the classic "always be writing" (which of course never changes). But in the past that always meant "write a feature spec". The last few years though there has been a sea change to writing TV pilots to try and break in to the business...