The screen writer (Apr-Oct 1948)

The Newspaper Myth THE greatest killer of young, or potential literary talent, especially screenwriting or playwriting talent, is neither poverty nor difficulty of getting published or produced, nor even laziness or despair. It is newspapering. Working on newspapers has aborted more possible Ibsens and O'Neills before they were born (born in the literary sense of creating things worthy of their gifts), and has chewed into tattered, bored, frightenend workmen manufacturing dreary pulpstuff, more gifted mighthave-been dramatists and novelists than all other villains put together. I suppose most will not agree with me, because it is hard to fracture a myth as old and well-believed as the notion that being on the editorial payroll of the Kankakee Gazette, New York Times, or Pittsburgh Press, is the finest novitiate in the world for the man who wants to be a writer. All I have to say applies with as much justification to authoring of novels and other forms of creative prose as it does to screenwriting and playwriting; but newspapering exercises an even more malign hand in spoiling, stultifying and permanently sterilizing the seeds of talent for dramatic writing than it does in the other fields. By "newspaper writing" I do not mean doing a daily column, or composing editorials or book reviewes, or any other kind of reviews, or advertising soliciting or similar things; 1 mean being a newspaperman — a reporter who goes out and covers meetings of the Water Commission, or the City Council, or the City Hall beat, or covers crimes ; or a rewrite man who sits in the office and rattlebangs out the stories all day long, or a city desk man, or a slot man or a man on the copy rim. I also include sportswriters, though the level of writing they indulge in on almost all newspapers is so menial and hackneyed that I feel sure it is not even necessary for anybody to point out the lethal effect of a few years of this straightjacketed, stylized assemblyline experience on any possible real talent. I mention this particularly because the fiction is especially strong that sportswriting is a wonderful compost for the fertile literary seed to sprout in. Unfortunately the product of the sports page serves only to corrode, not to encourage, growth. After a year or two in this humus of wornout verbs and tattered adjectival phrases, the germ of any imaginative life is quiescent. I suppose the brilliance of a few in the past like Ring Lardner is responsible for the perpetuation of this nonsensical fiction, and I do not doubt that there have been literary gifts so sturdy that they could occasionally survive, but they are rare, and some of those who might be named, like Heywood Broun, attained fame all right, but not as novelists, playwrights, or screenwriters. ONE ought to state one's qualifications when making these kind of blunderbuss statements : I wore out shoe leather and typewriter ribbons for eleven years on newspapers in San Francisco and New York as leg man, feature writer, beat man, rewrite man and desk man. I spent most of the time in pursuits which are so generally believed to be tonic for writing — doing garden variety reporting, covering every kind of news story, and coming in and writing the story for the home edition after phoning it in earlier, I did it because I had to earn a living, and because I liked doing it very much, and not because the thought ever entered my head that it would be good medicinally for any talent I might have had. This awareness of the dangerously meningital effects of continued newspaper work on creative gifts did not strike me until years later and only when I began thinking about some of the fine potential talents I had known, and wondering why they had withered. I suppose I could be accused of rationalizing my own shortcomings, and using this as a convenient means of excusing myself to myself for all my own faults, but I do not think this is the case. I have arrived at my own conclusions on a reasonably factual basis after long analytical rumination. I have been puzzled by the persistence of this newspaper myth, and by the absurd deference which people, especially in pictures, exhibit toward the thing called "newspaper experience." I can think of very few things less useful or more harmful to the flowering of any kind of genuine literary ability. PART of the strength of the legend regarding newspapering as the best training for writing lies in the fallacy that a great many good men were thus schooled ; but almost without exception it will be found on closer examination that they only stayed in the newspaper business a few months, like Sinclair Lewis, or else wrote a column, which has nothing whatever to do with being a newspaperman. Another girder in the myth's structure is the idea that it is an "adventurous" profession in which a writer sees a good deal of life, that is to say he brushes against seamy people and great people, and violence and historical events. This also is unfortunately fallacious. Being a non-participating spectator at an occasional event has The Screen Writer, August, 194