Radio stars (Oct 1938)

RADIO STARS Rinse gleaming lustre into your hair with Colorinse (fuickly, simply! Colorinse is easy to use - it is not an ordinary bleach or dye. Complete every shampoo with your own special shade of Nestle Colorinse. It rinses away shampoo lilm - mates your hair soft and easy to handle leaves it lustrous - helps make waves last longer. Colorinse glorifies your hair. Consult the Nestle Color Chart at your nearest toilet goods counter - today! lOc for package of 2 rinses at i Oc stores. 25c for 5 rinses at drug and dept. stores. See how Oatmeal Cleans Away Excess Oiliness! Now science finds that Oatmeal Skin Cleanser actually absorbs excess oil . . helps remove blackheads Grandma used Oatmeal as a skin beautifier — and now recent scientific research reveals that pure oatmeal is wonderfully effective insing the skin oiliness and grime, ancj jn helping remove blackheads. Today a new beauty aid, Lavena, brings you pure oatmeal powder specially refined and processed for daily cosmetic use. Thousands of women now praise Lavena— many use it in place of soap or creams for daily cleansing. Lavena cleanses thoroughly without injury to the live growing cells which form fresh new smooth skin. Begin to use Lavena today— almost overnight you will see improvement in your complexion. At leading 10c stores; also drug, and department stores. 10c, 50c, SI .00 Sizes. Sample Write to The Lavena Corporation, Dept. FREE 100, 141 West Jackson Blvd., Chicago. WRITE SO YOUR AUNT SUSANNAH CAN UNDERSTAND YOU BY LILIAN LAUFERTY (Author of Your Family and Mine, heard over NBC-Red network) "SIT down at the typewriter at nine o'clock every morning, put your lingers on the guide keys — and write. And write so your Aunt Susannah in Keokuk can understand you." As if I had clipped that paragraph from Today, it has stayed in my mind. And yet, I heard it said only once — by Arthur Brisbane, when I first went to work at the age of nineteen, fresh out of Smith College. Brisbane intended that advice as a newspaperman to a newspaperwoman. However, looking back, I realize that those same wise words hold true for radio . . . "write so your Aunt Susannah in Keokuk can understand you." The day of that historic remark was almost my first day on the job at the New York Journal. My first assignment, given me by the city editor, was to interview the wife of a condemned murderer. The man was in the Sing Sing death house. I had no idea where Gertrude, his wife was. The day was bitterly cold, and the snow and hail lashed at me for hours before I found a friendly truck driver who told me where the woman lived. At the Bronx address there was a new tenant, who said my objective had moved to the home of an aunt in Greenwich, Connecticut. I went to Greenwich. My story to the aunt that I had gone to school with Gertrude seemed to have been ill-chosen, because she said : "Faith, and you not a day over nineteen." (Gertrude, I learned later, was thirty-five.) She told me, though, that Gertie was in a New York hospital awaiting the birth of her child. Back in New York, I couldn't see poor Gertie, but the nurses told me that her husband's accomplice, already executed, had a sister working in a hat shop. I found the sister, took her to dinner out of my meager funds, and with great difficulty prevailed upon her to talk. At ten that night, back in the city room, I sat down at my typewriter. This time, my fingers didn't rest on any guide keys — they flew over the keyboard. At two that morning I had finished and turned in my copy. I had my first glimmering, then, of what Brisbane meant — although years later, when I was to write for radio, I understood completely. I wrote that first story so that my aunt, back home, could understand what had happened. I always have tried to write that way since. Radio has a great need for the essentially human story that is told believably. And to become a successful radio writer, you must exercise great judgment. Radio serial writing, particularly, demands many things; a definite understanding of people, a feeling for story value, a sense of selectivity, and a definite sense of conflict. Everyone doesn't write from a set routine. No formula could hold true, for instance, for both Your Family ami Mine and a blood-and-thunder adventure story, wherein the hero, no sooner emerging from an Everglades swamp infested with crocodiles, falls into another swamp, and as the day's instalment ends, is slowly sinking. I don't feel capable of turning out such adventure stories, because I haven't lived in a similar cycle. Except for my career in the newspaper field, I have been a normal, average American woman and wife. I write what I know to be life. Therefore, what follows in the way of writing formula is my own routine. I can't speak for other radio scripters. In the actual process of getting out a script, I start with one character or a family group. If I'm writing a serial, I live with all my characters. Such a process may involve weeks of work. I eat, live and sleep with them. They must become so real that I know what colors they like, what their reactions are to other people — and they must, finally, become so real that they come alive on my typewriter. I plan their lives a year ahead and write accordingly, a year's synopsis following. After that comes the synopsis of the story for thirteen weeks, and finally the story day-byday. I start writing right after breakfast, which usually comes at about seven each morning. Because I cannot hear the words when I type, I write my script in longhand. It takes about two hours of steady writing to do one fifteen-minute script. But the actual work — thinking it out and pointing it in relation to the story's future action — is equivalent to doing a short story. After my secretary types the story, it takes at least two more hours to {Continued on page 89) 62