Support Staff 201: The Writers’ Assistant
Writers’ Assistant is the best support staff position. (And it isn’t even a debate.)
Okay, we can debate it, but we’re definitely right. That doesn’t make it easy. Or a slam dunk for getting promoted. But you’ve got a seat at the table from the very beginning, and in most cases—assuming your Showrunner runs a relatively inclusive room—you’ll be able to pitch some ideas and show them what you’ve got.
So what exactly is a Writers’ Assistant? Whom are you assisting? And how?
You are the assistant to the story, and to the writing process.
Well, notice where the apostrophe lives! You are the assistant to all of the writers, as opposed to someone specific, like the Showrunner. But really, you are the assistant to the story and to the writing process. You won’t be responsible for life tasks, like one is with many assistant positions, but rather, you’re responsible for recording the truth and history for the story, how it is broken, and what everyone needs to remember when they get to the point of writing outlines, story areas, and scripts.
Your duties will vary from room to room, but the core tasks are:
DAILY NOTES. You are in charge of keeping a detailed record of what is said in the room every day. Some Showrunners want a verbatim rundown of everything said, but most will just want to know what was pitched, how it was received, and most importantly, where the room landed on a specific idea.
Always ask your Showrunner for their preferences. The best thing they can do is send you notes they liked from a previous room. Then you can see what degree of summarizing they prefer whether or not they want to see the ideas attributed to the writer who said them, and how extensive of annotation they like to see.
At the end of every day, you’ll go through your notes, clean them up, get them ready for people to read, and send them out to everyone in the room. Most people will never read them until they're frantically trying to remember how the room wanted to handle a particularly nuanced moment between two characters weeks later, but people often have to step out for meetings or to go to set, and your notes will keep track of what the latest decisions were while they were gone. (And of course, there's always that one person who reads them every day and compliments the way you captured a certain idea, which is a nice treat!)
TRACKING THE STORY. Everyone will rely on you to remember what has been discussed and decided, so they’ll also look to you when there are questions. Did we decide the mom character had two or three kids? Did the hero grow up in Wyoming or New York City? Eventually people will forget, and you (or your notes) need to remember. As the season progresses, what happened in Episode 101 or 102, or which of several potential paths was picked, is hard for anyone to keep track of. Except for you!
“BOARD DOCS.” When the writers finish breaking an episode, they’ll have a complete board that includes all the story beats in summary. The writer assigned to that episode will need to write an outline or story area, and to do that, they’ll need the board and your notes to decode it. So you’re in charge of making a document that recreates the board in a digital form and aggregates all the relevant notes, pitches, and decisions that lead to each beat in the story. It will get quite long! Include notes from every day the episode was discussed, if they could help the writer as they write.
Show that you understand how good stories are told, and that you’re ready to be a staff writer.
Overall, being a Writers’ Assistant is a pretty straightforward job. The more closely you listen and the more intuitively you synthesize, summarize, and track the progression of the story, the more valuable you are to the room. And unlike some of the other support staff positions we've covered, this presents an opportunity to actually show that you understand how good stories are told, stand out, and show that you’re ready to be a Staff Writer.
Of course, you’ll also want to be a nice person and connect with the other writers in the room, since you’ll all be together all day every day, but also because they’re the ones who will help you get to the next step. And there can be some great perks for Writers’ Assistants:
WA’s are often first in line for a promotion to Staff Writer. (Script Coordinators and Showrunner’s Assistants can also have close relationships that put them ahead of you in line for promotion.)
On longer seasons, you might luck out and be assigned a script or get to co-write with a staffed writer, especially if people like you and you’ve shown that you understand the show with your notes and answers to story questions.
All of which means, the MOST IMPORTANT thing you can do before you start your job as a WA is to make sure you have a killer sample script all ready to go. You never know when the Showrunner or another writer might ask to read your script. And that’s something that’s only going to happen once, so you want to be set to seize the opportunity.
If only there was a Script Consulting service that could help you get that script ready…😉