I am doing the research for a book on writing for television and came across this quote (in a tweet): “Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.” Cyril Connolly
I re-tweeted, commenting that what Cyril Connolly is saying is rubbish. It is simply not true for 95% of the thousands of writers I have met over the last 40 years. It is cute but makes assumptions about the purity of being a writer that suggests pure self-indulgence.
There are some writers who genuinely do not care if no one ever reads what they write. There are mss and scripts in bottom drawers that stay there. There may even be some masterpieces in those drawers, since writers are often not the best judges of what they have written.
The book on writing for television, which I am co-writing with Christopher Walker with whom I set up the MA in Television Scriptwriting at De Montfort University (check it out http://bit.ly/4BTnVd), is intended to be the best guide to actually getting to work for TV producers and broadcasters.
Why set up a post-grad course focused only on television? Because that is the only place where writers can more easily get hired, earn money and (perhaps as important) get the experience of going through the development process so that they can see how what they imagined ends up on screen, as it passes through many hands, from casting directors to script editors, producers, directors, actors and film or tape editors.
This is the coal-face, this is where the real learning is done, rather than in academia where all too often the teaching is done by academics not very experienced practitioners. And in far too many universities the industry guest lecturers are to few and far between.
I have no problem with writers writing for their bottom drawer. But most are desperate to be read and watched; most have something important to say and most want to earn a living from their writing. Quotes like the Connolly one need to be balanced by the famous Samuel Johnson quote “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”
Neither are 100% correct, but the Johnson quote is far closer to the reality than the Connolly one.
Tags: Christopher Walker, Cyril Connolly, De Montfort University, Samuel Johnson, writing for money
I’m with Samuel Johnson….I’d also say that money is the way of keeping score. In other words, people wouldn’t pay to read/watch what you write, unless it was any good.
The MA in Television Writing is a totally desirable thing, and counteracts the dreadful prejudice in some places against TV drama as an art form. I helped Karin Bamborough set up the TV module at the NFTS, and the culture was SO feature film there it was unreal. Still, we prevailed. I also (much as I love them) teach at the London Film School which teaches no telly at all, and has no desire to do so.
It’s a tragedy we’ve had no single drama slots on the BBC for the last ten or more years, since the end of Screen 1 and 2…when the history of TV writing is written these won’t be seen as dark times (some great series and serials have been made.) But there WILL be a huge gap when it comes to quirky, idiosyncratic vision pieces of the kind TV used to produce weekly. It’s as if publishers stopped publishing literary fiction…there’d still be great crime and SF (!) and other genre novels out there, but hey, wouldn’t we miss it? Wouldn’t someone protest?
Sorry, thought I’d get that rant out of the way.
Interesting blog Julian, and I agree with your take on Connolly’s comment. I think with screenwriting particularly, ie as opposed to prose which can more easily be “shared” with others and even plays that can be performed for small groups or audiences, the over-riding goal is to get it up there on the screen at the end of the day.
I’d like to add another quote, from Ted Tally who adapted Silence Of The Lambs which I’ve just read as it happens. Interviewed by Kevin Conroy Scott in Screenwriters’ Mastersclass (Faber & Faber, 2005) Tally says: “There’s nothing deader than an un-produced screenplay”.
I’m with Connolly.
He isn’t saying that you shouldn’t write for money. He is merely warning that if you do you will lose a degree of your personal integrity, which is probably correct.
Any form of writing, the primary aim of which is to “please the public” is inevitably tainted as far as the writer goes, for it will be full of compromise.
The so called “development process” basically consists of others telling the writer what to write and how to write it. If you are willing to accept that, fine, you may have a long and profitable career. But you can have a long and profitable career without compromising too. Many have. At least in the theatre and in books. But in film and TV, maybe not.
Samuel Johnson was not primarily a creative writer. He was a pedant, an essayist and a dictionary compiler. He wrote little fiction.
In his situation it plainly made no sense to write for anything other than money. But that isn’t true for someone who has a story to tell.
Sadly script writing is a compromiser’s medium and likely to remain so. It might make you rich but it won’t do anything for your soul. And Connolly could see that.
Thanks for the comments. I agree re lack of singles on TV. Great opportunity missed but don’t entirely agree about unproduced screenplays. There are some great ones as there are some dead (dud?) ones that have been produced.
Cyril Connolly’s remark should be put into context.
It is taken from his book “The Enemies of Promise”. which asks why writers of considerable ability failed to achieve what they once seemed capable of.
Connolly was saying that the necessity of earning a living is one of the obstacles in the way of achieving anything great in terms of writing.
But he also lists success itself as another of the obstacles, meaning, I presume, that commercial success can take away or dilute artistic ambition.
In other words, it’s hard to make the money, but once you’ve made the money, it’s easier to go on taking it than to risk something new.
I wouldn’t miss literary fiction. Not one bit.
We wouldn’t have much of a culture if people had only ever written for money.
Many of the world’s greatest novels only left their authors as poor as when they had started.
If making money is the primary motive in any piece of writing then, paradoxically, it probably won’t make any money at all.
Cyril Connolly’s quote comes from his book “The Enemies of Promise.” That’s all he is saying: that writing to please other people is an obstacle in the way. He’s not saying you shouldn’t do it if that is your choice, merely to beware of it; it can compromise you.
Also, Samuel Johnson wasn’t really a creative writer. He produced only one novel, I think. He was an essayist, a journalist. It would have made no sense for him not to write for money. He had many clever remarks to make, but he didn’t really have a story he was burning to tell.
If your primary motivation is to make money, then writing is maybe the wrong way to go about it.
“Any form of writing, the primary aim of which is to “please the public” is inevitably tainted as far as the writer goes, for it will be full of compromise.”
I must take issue with this, for if a writer sets out to please the public all it might mean is that the writer understands what pleases the public (Aristotle’s ‘proper pleasure’ – see article by Ari Hiltunen and extract from his book in TwelvePoint’s archive) and is able to give them the story the writer WANTS to tell in a form that the public will find accessible and pleasing (scary etc).
The two things are not incompatible, except to not very good writers who are unlikely to achieve either anyway. They will often claim that the fact that no one likes what they have written is not important; they have their integrity. But actually (judging by the thousands of submissions I see) it might simply be badly written and demonstrating little understanding of how to tell this particular story in a way that makes it more satisfying to a wider audience.
The theory is all Aristotle, Hiltunen and Lajos Egri: theyy spell it out.
Thanks for the cool blog, it’s nice to browse things that produces sense or have a point not like a ton of geberish blogs. I do read a lot of these too Smile generally it’s just fun. Keep it coming.