It's a Living

Writers who want to work for radio & TV got advice from an expert this week. In the Writer, voluble Norman Corwin, who has turned out a spate of purple-prose documentaries for radio, offered a two-word prescription for success: "Be mediocre."

Now chief of Special Projects of United Nations Radio, Corwin advised his readers that radiomen want "the safe, routine, unspectacular, competent, journeyman script . . . with maybe a fresh twist no bigger than what you give to a lemon peel in a Martini." In TV, the writer is even less important: he "must step aside for Gorgeous George, Garrulous Godfrey . . . westerns, British films from the bottom of the vault, midget autos, roller-skating derbies . . . kitchen and fashion demonstrators, giveaways, and the upper slopes of Faye Emerson." But if he is willing "to curb his imagination" and to look on the medium as "a trade outlet, not an art... it's a living."

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