BY CHRISTOPHER RILEY
Spend enough time around working writers and you'll hear someone say a company "has a mandate" for something. A grounded thriller. A family comedy. A limited series built on a true story.
It sounds like insider language, and it is. But the idea underneath it is simple. Once you understand it, a lot of the business starts to make sense.
What a mandate is
A mandate is the kind of story a buyer is looking for right now. Literary manager Audrey Knox describes it in her newsletter as little more than a fancy name for the type of project a company wants at the moment.
Buyers are the companies that pay for scripts and shows: studios, networks, streamers, financiers, and the production companies that bring projects to them. Each one has a slate to fill, an audience to keep and a budget to spend. A mandate turns those needs into a sentence an executive can say on a phone call.
Where mandates come from
Mandates are business decisions before they are creative ones. A company may want more of what just worked. It may see a hole in its lineup, a genre it hasn't touched or an audience it isn't reaching. It may have a budget range to hit, or an actor or director it wants to build something around.
So a mandate tells you something useful, but limited. It tells you what one company thinks it needs this season. It doesn't tell you what a good story is.
How writers hear about them
Most writers never see a mandate written down. Executives tell the agents and managers they work with what they're looking for, and those reps check it against their clients' scripts. Knox describes reps keeping running notes of mandates so they can match them to work they already represent.
Without representation, you'll still hear echoes: in general meetings, at panels and pitch events, in industry newsletters and in conversations with other writers. Treat what you hear secondhand with care. By the time a mandate reaches the open internet, it may already have changed.
Why they keep changing
Mandates move from season to season, and sometimes faster. An executive leaves and takes their taste with them. A film opens big, or doesn't. A company merges, cuts back or changes direction. What was urgent in the spring can be gone by the fall.
That is the most important thing to understand about mandates, because it changes how you should use them.
The timing problem
Over the course of my career, I've spent anywhere from a handful of months to more than a year developing and writing a solid feature or a pilot script. Even developing a new series idea to pitch takes from weeks to months. A mandate can come and go faster than a good script can be written. If you hear about one and start a new screenplay to fit it, you're racing a clock you can't see. Even if you finish in time, the door may have closed, and the script you rushed is still a script you rushed.
The writers who benefit from a mandate are usually the ones who already have something that fits. Their script was written before anyone asked for it. The mandate gave it a place to land.
How to use a mandate
Treat mandates like a weather report, not an assignment. They tell you about conditions. They don't tell you where to go.
Notice patterns. One mandate is a moment. The same kind of request turning up season after season tells you something about what the market keeps needing.
Check what you already have. When you hear a mandate, ask, "Do I have something that fits?" before you ask, "Should I write something that fits?"
Keep your voice. Nobody hires a writer because their script sounds like everyone else's answer to the same request.
Keep writing what you're best at. That's where your strongest work comes from, and it's the work a mandate can eventually find.
What's next
If mandates reward writers who are ready, the real question is how to be ready. Next week I'll talk about building a body of work: a set of finished scripts that gives you options when the right request comes along. After that, I'll make the case for going back to scripts you think are done.
Wondering whether a script of yours fits where the market is heading? That's a good question to bring to a professional. On StoryChatPro, a script that scores 7.5 or higher unlocks a one-on-one session with a script consultant who has real industry credits.