The writers' assistant job gives most people their first experience inside a writers' room. And that can be an amazing experience.
You get to see how an episode is crafted. You get to see how to create a season of television.
For me, I learned more storytelling lessons in the first month of being a writers' assistant than I did my entire time in college.
It's one thing to learn things by the book. It's a whole other thing to experience them and see how they fit into the very practical and commercial medium of TV.
The thing is...
These jobs are hard to come by. And even when you see an open position, it can be really difficult to know enough to be qualified to get the job.
This post will tackle a few things...
What a writers' assistant does
What you need to know to be prepared for the job
How to get the job
So, let's start by defining the job itself...
What does a writers' assistant job entail?
In a writers' room, there are anywhere from 4-18 writers sitting around a big conference table.
They talk all day about story and characters and things like that. Meanwhile, the writers' assistant is the one in the writers' room writing all of this down.
At the end of the day, the writers' assistant will have a Word document that can be up to 40 or 50 pages long. They have to make sense of that thing.
That means if there was a general structure for an episode, that should be clear and moved to the front of the document. If there were any lines of dialogue that people gravitated towards, that should be front and center as well.
In comedy writers' rooms, writers' assistants will also have to be in control of the script and be "on screen." That means plugging into the two big TV monitors in every writers' room and fixing the script in Final Draft as dictated by the showrunner. It's difficult and requires a high-level knowledge of the software.
Which brings me to my next point...
How to prep for being a writers' assistant
Get to know Final Draft very well. There are features like revisions or locked pages that are crucial for a writers' assistant, and a lot of what happens while shooting on the stage is dependent on getting the right pages from you.
So, a lot is riding on your shoulders.
In terms of the note taking, a general sense of episodic story structure and being able to type fast will help greatly.
In addition, understanding the flow of a writers' room will be hugely beneficial.
You need to know who to listen to, who not to listen to, what to commit to the notes, what might just be a room joke. There's a lot of talk during an 8-16 hour day. And you need to be on and alert for that whole time.
But because so many of these experiences are writers' room experience-dependent, it can be difficult to become qualified to be a writers' assistant without being in or near a writers' room.
Which brings me to my last point...
How to get the job
These jobs aren't posted online. On very rare occasions, they may be posted in writers' assistant and script coordinator Google or Facebook groups.
However, those groups are generally closed and you need to be a writers' assistant to be in one. Therefore, you should ask around.
See if you know anybody who knows anybody who IS in fact in one of these groups. Have them keep an eye out for you.
Still, without any experience, it will be difficult to get a writers' assistant job. Despite how it sounds, these are not entry-level positions.
What you should be looking for is a Writers' PA job. These are PAs who exclusively work in the writers' room and get close to the current writers' assistants and script coordinators.
Most promotions happen from within. And in most cases, it is the Writers' PA who gets promoted to writers' assistant.
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