[WRITING] "Sometimes amateur writers need a professional opinion"

[rfmcdonald]

The Globe and Mail's Kate Taylor had an essay on writing that I've been paying attention to lately.

Urjo Kareda, the artistic director at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre from 1982 until his death in 2001, was famous for many things. One of them was his commitment to reading every offering that every aspiring playwright ever sent his theatre. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, he read as many as 500 unsolicited scripts a year.

He responded to the writers, too, delivering honest assessments of their scripts in what could be notoriously sharp-worded letters. Kareda had previously worked as theatre critic at the Toronto Star and clearly didn’t believe in mollycoddling dramatists – or deceiving would-be dramatists as to their chances.

His reading probably didn’t uncover any hidden gems; the various new play development programs he established at Tarragon were surely far more important to the theatre’s artistic success. But if Kareda’s approach to unsolicited material was inefficient, it was also admirable. It suggested a commitment to the idea of playwriting and to the community of playwrights that extended far beyond the needs of his individual company; it suggested he felt it was his duty, as a salaried cultural arbiter, to acknowledge all those unpaid aspirants in need of cultural arbitration.

When HarperCollins announced recently that it would close its website Authonomy Sept. 30, I didn’t mourn the forum to which writers could post unpublished manuscripts for peer review; instead, I mourned the professional spirit of Urjo Kareda. A handful of published, bestselling authors whose work was first discovered on Authonomy are apparently deeply saddened by its demise, but the site sounds as though it was mainly a way to get the slush pile to read the slush pile. Self-publishing, print-on-demand and the fan-fiction phenomenon have eroded the distinction between amateurs and professionals in the literary industries, but every so often you get a small reminder that sometimes you need to send in a pro.