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their own ignorance of what is going on in the business; some of it is due to fear; and a little of it, to their disinclination to work for less money than they are in the habit of getting and, at the same time, to work in a medium they consider unfamiliar.
I have sympathy with some of the reservations that certain writers feel in regard to radio. If a writer is writing solely to make money and if he is making a great deal, one can understand his not wanting to be bothered with radio writing. Similarly, if a writer is writing for the purpose of creating a great body of work and of enjoying the attendant prestige that this will someday afford him, one can understand this attitude, too. Such a writer’s radio work will die with the program’s sign-off. The impermanence of the work and the anonymity of the writer represent two of the greatest handicaps of radio in attracting established writers to the industry. A third handicap is the demand of radio for frequent and uninterrupted output. To work any writer beyond his capacity for normal output is certain to emasculate his powers. All writers are in a sense wells of inventiveness, and their creative flow is in most cases measurable, predictable, and constant. To force this flow beyond its natural rate of production adulterates it. Sludge comes up, not oil.
Alexander Woollcott has been writing everyday for thirty years, but radio drained him dry, and he had to take time out to refill. In Mr. Woollcott’s defense — not that he needs any — it should be added that it took radio nearly three years to empty him. Channing Pollock, “dean of American playwrights,” undertook a weekly one-hour original. It nearly killed him. “It’s over half of a full-length play,” he said. “It takes me six months to write a play.” There you have it. These two men, both of front-rank prominence in their respective fields, both of them craftsmen with the most exacting habits of work, were finally pinioned by radio, the most regular and voracious consumer of material in the world’s history of entertainment. Woollcott and Pollock are in no way exceptions. Both of them have fine contributions to make in radio. They have already done so — Woollcott especially — and will again. But they can’t turn it on
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