An Open Letter to America’s Writers
Why I’m Writing This
I don’t usually write to unions or guilds. I’m not a screenwriter or a playwright, and I don’t pretend to know the daily battles of your craft. I am, however, a psychologist and an educator who spends his life studying how people find meaning in the stories they tell themselves, and the stories they’re given by culture.
Right now, the cultural atmosphere in America is toxic. From television to social media to politics, the air we breathe is saturated with contempt, irony, and despair. This isn’t just unpleasant background noise. Psychologically, it erodes our ability to believe in one another, to hold on to dignity, to imagine a better future.
I’ve been reflecting on the power of writers in past eras to provide something different. Shows from the 1980s and 1990s—whether spiritual like Touched by an Angel, humanistic like Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman or Early Edition, or philosophical like Star Trek: The Next Generation—gave millions of viewers a reason to believe in possibility. They weren’t naïve, but they insisted that goodness was still imaginable. Even now, more recent series like This Is Us, Abbott Elementary, The Good Place, and the early seasons of Ted Lasso prove that audiences remain hungry for layered, meaningful stories that affirm dignity, hope, and belonging.
This letter is not an academic essay, and it’s not a partisan statement. It is an appeal to the creative community: to the Writers Guild, the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and to anyone who sits down at a keyboard with the intention of shaping a world. Because in fractured times, the stories you tell don’t just entertain; they become the emotional climate the rest of us live inside.
An Open Letter to America’s Writers
To the members of the Writers Guild of America West, the Writers Guild of America East, the Dramatists Guild of America, the Authors Guild, and to every screenwriter, playwright, and storyteller who carries the pen:
In 1994, CBS premiered Touched by an Angel. It wasn’t alone in offering hope. Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman showed the courage to heal and lead in a divided frontier town. Early Edition gave us an ordinary man with tomorrow’s newspaper and the chance to change the future for strangers. 7th Heaven explored family, faith, and the struggle to live with integrity. Star Trek: The Next Generation stretched our moral imagination by asking what it means to be human. And before them, Highway to Heaven carried forward the idea that compassion could change lives.
These shows weren’t identical in philosophy. Some were explicitly spiritual, others humanistic, others ethical and philosophical. But taken together, they formed a cultural thread: a reminder that goodness, courage, and meaning were still possible in a world often defined by cynicism. They gave people something better than despair to hold onto.
We are once again living in a moment of cultural fracture. The air is thick with negativity, contempt, and division. From television pundits who trade in outrage, to social media algorithms that amplify our worst instincts, to politicians who thrive on fear—our public imagination is being starved. The constant hum of anger and ridicule has become the background noise of American life. It doesn’t take a psychologist to see what that does to the human spirit, though I can confirm what you already sense: despair multiplies when no story offers an alternative.
Writers, this is where you come in.
You know better than anyone that human beings don’t just consume stories, we live inside them. The scripts, the stage plays, the screenplays you create have the power to alter the emotional current of a nation. For every cynical laugh track, there could be a story that restores dignity. For every narrative of cruelty, there could be one that renews courage. The public imagination is not fixed; it is shaped, day after day, by what you choose to bring into being.
This is not a call for saccharine comfort or simplistic morality plays. America doesn’t need more empty optimism. It needs depth, vision, and narratives that help people feel the possibility of wholeness again. Stories that refuse to reduce life to bitterness or mockery. Stories that remind us of our capacity to be better, not because life is easy, but because meaning is worth fighting for. And recent series like This Is Us, Abbott Elementary, The Good Place, and Ted Lasso have already shown that audiences respond when hope and humanity are written with honesty and complexity.
So I am asking you—members of the Writers Guild, the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, and every independent writer in between—to write. Write screenplays that dare to lift. Write plays that refuse to pander to despair. Write characters who stumble, but who also discover something worth holding onto. Write stories that give us the imaginative raw material to believe in each other again.
And I pledge this in return: when I see work that restores dignity and enlarges the imagination, I will point to it. In my classrooms, in my essays, in my lectures, in my media presentations, and in my public writing, I will amplify it so that more people can see what is possible. Because the task of rebuilding our cultural imagination is not yours alone; it belongs to all of us who care about the stories we live inside.
Our culture doesn’t just need more content. It needs courage, vision, and imagination. And those will come only from the pens of its writers.
Sincerely,
RJ Starr