Woman: What do you do?
Man: Me? Oh, I write books.
Woman: How interesting! Have you sold anything recently?
Man: Why, yes. My couch, my car and my flat-screen television.
A snarkier writer-father might have added, “and I sold those things to pay for your private school tuition!” But instead it got me thinking that there was a real problem here. Not just a small problem involving issues of respect between one writer and one teenager, but rather a national problem of respect where being a writer has become so widely associated with being a loser that we have become the stuff of common jokes.
Ah, I think anyone in my writing group relates to this idea. And all my journalist-newspaper-writing friends feel some empathy here too.
From Bail out the writers! in the New York Times.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment