I have no "insider" info to offer about this strike and some of you have sent in questions to which my answer would just be "I dunno." But I can perhaps point you to sources that may be of help. The Hollywood Reporter has this interview with WGA West president Meredith Stiehm and David Goodman and Chris Keyser, who are co-chairs of the negotiating committee. What they report sounds a lot like things we heard during the previous four Writers Guild strikes since I became a member.
And the Los Angeles Times has this explainer explaining what WGA members can and cannot do during the work stoppage. It pretty much comes down to doing anything on any project that is under the jurisdiction of the Guild. I can write comic books and articles and books…and that's fine.
When the 1985 strike hit, I was writing a live-action pilot script for a certain network's Saturday morning schedule. I had tried to finish it before the strike was called but some things just can't be written as swiftly as you might like. I don't recall what day of the week the strike was probably going to commence but let's say it was a Wednesday. On Monday morning, a senior exec at that network phoned me and the conversation went roughly like this…
EXEC: Any chance we could have it by close of business tomorrow?
ME: I don't think so. Not if you want it to be any good. You just sent me to script on this last Friday.
EXEC: I know. We should have given you the go-ahead two weeks ago. Well, take whatever time you need to finish it. You know, I'd never ask a writer to hand in material during a strike but it would not bother me if one morning, I opened my front door to find a manila envelope there next to my morning paper. You know where I live.
ME: I do. And if it'll make you happy, I'll swing by and leave a manila envelope on your front porch. It won't have anything in it…oh, wait. I could give you my mother's recipe for potato latkes. Would you like that?
EXEC: Thanks. But we can't fill the 9:30 AM time slot with your mother's recipe for potato latkes. It would certainly be more entertaining than the show we have on there right now but I wouldn't want to make your mother into a scab.
The End of That Story: The strike ended — badly for the Writers Guild — in two weeks. I then finished the script, handed it in and they bought a cartoon show instead of my project for the 9:30 AM time slot. Many months later after that other program had debuted, the Exec called and said he wished he'd put my mother's recipe on instead. He said, "At least the animation would have been better."