The Call to Arms
I don’t exactly know why but writers are usually a quiet and long-suffering lot. Sure there are a few of us cantankerous alpha male bastards who frequently get into trouble for baring our fangs at producers and directors too often, but generally speaking writers are better at being alone with our thoughts than interacting with other people, especially the non-writer kind. If you go to a production party, chances are you’ll see the show’s creatives in a corner of the room, quietly debating art, politics, and philosophy amongst themselves while the rest of the staff noisily chatter about world-shattering things like who bought what kind of luxury car. It is this timid attitude in our ranks– this lack of desire to fight– that has led our kind to this state. Recently though, more and more writers are rattling the chains. There was a time when fellow wordmongers I talk to would merely scratch their heads and make jokes about the situation. Those days are over. It seems that the years of getting cheated, exploited, and demeaned have finally sunk in. Nowadays, when writers get together in a room, there is a sense of something about to detonate.
