Art & Creativity Quote by Thomas Keneally

Keneally’s jab lands because it targets a modern literary reflex: writing fiction with one eye on the bookstore and the other on Netflix. Calling it “a folly” isn’t just craft advice; it’s a warning about how market logic quietly rewires imagination. A novel “for the screen” is already conceding that the real prize is elsewhere, that prose is a pitching format rather than an art with its own muscle. The phrase “screen contract” is doing heavy work here. It reduces storytelling to a transaction, a pre-sold product, a future option agreement. The subtext is almost moral: if you’re composing scenes to be easily storyboarded, you’re not writing a novel so much as a screenplay wearing a paperback disguise.

The line also defends what novels uniquely do well and what screens often sand down: interiority, digression, the slow accrual of meaning, the odd sentence that changes your sense of a character without changing the plot. Film and TV thrive on compression and external action; the novel can luxuriate in thought, contradiction, and voice. Writing “with a screen contract in mind” pressures the book to behave like an audition: clean arcs, visual set pieces, minimal ambiguity. That’s not just a stylistic shift; it’s a change in artistic sovereignty.

Contextually, Keneally is speaking from inside an industry where adaptation is both compliment and economic lifeline. He’s not anti-film; he’s anti self-censorship. The irony is that the best-adapted novels tend to be the least obedient to adaptation, because they were written to be novels first.