Tag Archives: Creative Writing

Will Self: Why I Don’t Teach Creative Writing

17 Tuesday Feb 2015

Posted by in Interview, Writing

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Will Self

“I don’t teach creative writing because I think it’s a fatuous thing to do, but if anybody young asks me for advice, what I say to them is: ‘Do you, when you look back at a page of your work, get inflicted with a dreadful sense of futility and a sense that it’s cardboard, and it’s meaningless and that it doesn’t express an iota of what you wanted to say, and that it’s hackneyed, and it’s clichéd?’, and they go: ‘Yeah.’

I respond: ‘Right. You’re always going to feel like that. Accept it. It doesn’t matter how many languages you’re translated into, or how many awards you win or accolades you receive, you will still feel that way about what you do’. That is not all art, that is the virtuality of being a writer.”

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Will Self, speaking in an interview with Christine Fears.

More from Will:

I Like Words

02 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by in Film, Humor, Writing

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Words

Here’s the story: In 1934, a twenty-five-year-old named Robert Pirosh quit his well-paying but tedious job as a copywriter in New York and moved to Hollywood, hoping to kickstart his dream career as a screenwriter. Arriving in California, Pirosh compiled the names and addresses of as many top studio execs as he could, then proceeded to send each of them what is without doubt one of the most colorful, creative, and irresistible cover letters ever produced. This document secured him three interviews, one of which would land him a job as a junior writer at MGM. And as they say, the rest is history: Pirosh would go on to win the Oscar for best original screenplay for his 1949 war drama Battleground, but his other masterpiece — the one which first set him on his path to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre — is reproduced in full below:

Dear Sir:

I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave “v” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land’s-sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, flowery words, such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blubber, squeal, drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.

I like the word screenwriter better than copywriter, so I decided to quit my job in a New York advertising agency and try my luck in Hollywood, but before taking the plunge I went to Europe for a year of study, contemplation and horsing around.

I have just returned and I still like words. May I have a few with you?

Robert Pirosh

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The 1934 cover letter sent by Robert Pirosh to Hollywood executives.

I took the above picture a few minutes ago.

Read on:

  • Mark Twain’s hilarious, furious letter to a snake oil salesman
  • J.R.R. Tolkien’s smart, sharp letter replying to a Nazi publisher
  • Ernest Hemingway’s first letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald

Robert Pirosh