A great writer, Norman Corwin, turned 100 today, creating the perfect occasion to celebrate the beauty of words beautifully used.
If you don’t know Corwin, it’s my pleasure to introduce a living American treasure. I’m extremely proud to know him and to have spent time with him. And to have spent this past weekend celebrating his birthday.
Norman Corwin with Westways Editor John Lehrer
Corwin was a pioneer of radio theater, and its undisputed master. He’s been called the Poet Laureate of Radio. I would submit he should also be celebrated as the Radio Laureate of Poetry. Because Corwin not only entertains, informs, and enthralls listeners, he gives readers and audiences the pleasure of beautiful language—language rendered with all the power and nuance of the most beautiful music.
His ear is uncanny—the euphony of his sentences would be the envy of Walt Whitman and Thomas Wolfe, two great writers he has acknowledged as influences. He writes bombast and beauty, poetry and power, like no other writer. He challenges tyrants, celebrates the little guy, extols the promise of America, and unsparingly savages anyone who would compromise the standards of anything he feels worth upholding, such as American democracy and the English language. But like a lilting aria following a fortissimo passage, he also soothes, enchants, and inspires the sweetest of reveries.
The volume and range of his body of work is breathtaking. His radio dramas were performed by the likes of Orson Welles, James Stewart, Frank Sinatra, Lionel Barrymore, and Walter Huston. His more recent plays have been performed by William Shatner, Samantha Eggar, Michael York, and Walter Cronkite. His screenplay of Lust for Life was nominated for an Academy Award. He’s written erudite books, brilliant magazine pieces, a collection of letters (you’ll love the tirades against capricious and idiotic changes to his words), astounding poetry, and ribald limericks.
My intent here is not to write a biography of Norman Corwin, but to pique your interest in his work…and to suggest a few things we freelance writers can learn from this man’s bold, high standards.
Develop an Ear for Words. This is the work of a lifetime, but it’s possible to achieve some degree musicality in everything you write. Vary the length of your sentences. Use words that sound pleasing or severe to suit the tone of what you’re writing. Read your work aloud; you’ll hear the clunky phrases. Fix them. As Corwin says, “The ear is the realist. It is the organ through which we perceive the subtlest of the arts, which is music.”
Look for the Story. And the Storyline. At one of the Corwin celebrations in Los Angeles this weekend, I watched a troupe of radio players perform his play Our Lady of Freedoms, which honored the Statue of Liberty’s 1986 centennial. Naturally I was moved by the beauty of the language. But I also marveled at how he wove threads of the story together—the sculptor and his patron, the campaign to finance its delivery by way of thousands of small donations, even the way the colossus was shipped. We as feature writers and journalists aren’t writing radio drama, but we can find and illuminate compelling storylines in anything we write. Don’t take the easiest route, the face-value, encyclopedic way. Look for ways to frame your stories and develop threads that bring storytelling into your stories.
Flesh Out the Details. The Statue of Liberty play was saturated with dazzling details—how much the statue weighed, how many crates it took to ship it, that it rained on the day of its dedication, that the average donation to fund it was 82 cents. By the way, those details were always in service of the story, never merely listed or bullet-pointed.
Flesh Out the Details Part 2. Yesterday, at a screening of Lust for Life, Corwin shared a bit of revelatory news. The screenplay has always been thought to have been based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Irving Stone. But Corwin admitted he hadn’t even read Stone’s novelized life of Vincent Van Gogh when he accepted the screenplay assignment, and that he relied on the letters of Vincent and Theo Van Gogh as his primary source for the screenplay. He was interested in truth, not its fictionalized facsimile. Compare that with the lazy “surf the Web” school of research so common these days.
Pay Attention. Great Attention. I was fortunate enough to travel to Hearst Castle about 10 years ago with Norman Corwin and an editorial crew from Westways magazine. Norman was on assignment; I was along for the ride. The man was 90 years old, but sharp as an eagle. He paid attention to everything. He took nothing for granted. He let nothing of interest slide by. He asked our host countless questions, drawing out stories that otherwise would have gone untold. Face value, I must say, was pretty fascinating—the story of Hearst and how all his treasures arrived in San Simeon, all his celebrated guests of the era. But Norman dug deeper. He got stories behind stories. Needless to say, his feature was brilliant.
The delight of being saturated in the words and energy of Norman Corwin this past weekend renewed my own resolve to always reach for excellence in everything I write, whether a 200-word service piece or a 3,000-word narrative feature. Listen to and read some Norman Corwin. Slosh around a bit in this man’s brilliance. Be proud to be a member of the same honorable profession. Uphold our honor.
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To learn more about Norman Corwin:
Visit his homepage, normancorwin.com.
Find written and audio work at Amazon.com, including the 2006 Academy Award–winning documentary, A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin.
Watch a 1996 documentary on Corwin here.
Listen to his best-known work, On a Note of Triumph, as heard by one of every two Americans when it aired in 1945.
