Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words. – Mark Twain

If it had been possible, I would have accompanied the attached article with pictures of our shelves stuffed with books, magazines, songbooks, photographs, Playbills, CDs and DVDs, and of my trunk stuffed with letters and postcards going back to my childhood. I still buy the tangible varietal of written, aural and verbal entertainment and am convinced my own personal poverty will result from my inability to completely bow in homage to the digital world. My husband, refusing to accompany me into the Dark Night of Destitution, has switched to a Nook.

Easy reading is damn hard writing. – Nathaniel Hawthorne

Do I really need to subscribe to the Sunday NY Times, sections of which end up under my bed in a pile, and to Rolling Stone, copies of which end up in a pile under my bed next to the Times? Do I really have to indulge in the bound version of Vanity Fair when I could just as easily succumb to its online pleasures? This is part old-fashioned stubbornness – whatever I buy is mine and I can loan it, bequeath it, horde it or display it howsoever I please.

It is also an insistence on separating the individual from the group. A bound version of Here is New York lies on my nightstand, proof that E.B. White is E.B. White and no one else. Easier to do with books than with magazines I’ll allow, but in the days of Christopher Hitchens, I bought Vanity Fair almost entirely to read his words rather than those of some other writer.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. – Ernest Hemingway

As a young girl my love affair was with magazines first – Life and Look and National Geographic – which took me out of my life and set me down somewhere in another part of the world. Gradually my affection shifted to writers themselves, who seemed to me like artists or dancers or musicians, painting the pages with words rather than notes or footsteps.

Some critics will write ‘Maya Angelou is a natural writer’ – which is right after being a natural heart surgeon. – Maya Angelou

So I get cranky when reading about Condé Nast’s new writer/author contracts, which lay claim to a significant portion of future film and television revenues resulting from any article, essay, story or excerpt that appears in one of their magazines. For If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage, goes the famous theatre adage, attributed to film and producer Fred F. Finklehoffe.

Yes, the publishing and magazine industries are on their knees. But it isn’t their writers’ fault. Don’t punish your talent. They are not chattel. If there were no writers, there would be no words. And if there were no words, there would be no books or magazines. Or songs, or poems, or plays, or television shows, or films or journalistic exposes.

And my bookshelves and my husband’s Nook would be empty. Support your favorite writers today. Buy a book or download an e-Book, buy a magazine or subscribe to one digitally, for…

The starving poet business is no good nowadays.  – Henrik Ibsen

#authorship   #writing   #publishingindustry  

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/business/media/conde-nast-contracts-cut-authors-share-in-film-deals.html?src=dayp&_r=0