A Day In The Life Of A WWE Creative Writer
Notes from yesterday’s production meeting.
The WWE Creative Writer, exhausted, physically and spiritually—imagine being a sous chef, delicately crafting plates of food all week, only for the head chef to throw every last dish onto the floor—shuffles into the writer’s room.
He is joined by several of his colleagues, none of whom have a background in professional wrestling. This isn’t a blanket criticism regurgitated from a Jon Moxley podcast: an unlisted video on WWE’s official YouTube channel legit provides a peek into the room. “My experience is in everything but WWE,” one hack says, as the rest of his colleagues reveal their backgrounds of “sports”, “music”, “film”, “TV”, and “soap operas”.
It’s a big, big week in WWE. Huge.
The company returns to its spiritual home of Madison Square Garden. Its legacy in the World’s Most Famous Arena was built, brick by brick, by the mega-drawing babyface prowess of Bruno Sammartino. History is teaching these writers a timeless lesson in pro wrestling, but d’oh! They don’t know jack sh*t about pro wrestling, so they are literally unqualified to learn it.
And so, tasked with getting Chad Gable over a couple of weeks back—“Over? Has Vince scrapped this?”—they lean on their experience in television. In television, sh*tty '90s television, the plucky hero overcomes the odds, but only after first learning how to believe in himself. Gable is so small, but it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog. The writer, in an attempt to convey that Gable wasn’t a confident dog just yet, had Gable look like a simpering puppy when his opponent, Shelton Benjamin, called him “short”.
The first draft of the script is returned, scorched by Vince McMahon’s red pen.
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