If you could live as the writer of your choice for 24 hours, (a la Being John Malkovich), who would you choose? (Assume said writer is in the prime of his/her life and/or career.)
That's a tough one. A number of my favorite writers had consistently miserable lives. Share an apartment with my surly mother, unhappily live in the closet, and desperately sell hackwork amidst the masterpieces at a penny a word just so I can eat? No thank you, Cornell Woolrich. Then there are the guys who were the slackers of their day. I'd love to have written "The Whisperer in the Darkness" and At the Mountains of Madness, but to share a house with my two aunts at age 40, live hand to mouth, and get divorced and never leave my hometown because I'm too racist and/or afraid to move to New York or Chicago with my wife? No thank YOU, H.P. Lovecraft. Drink myself stupid? Forget about it Jack Kerouac, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Edgar Allan Poe
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Build a time machine to go back and tell themselves to get off their high horses and prepare for the new media before they find themselves in this situation. If they'd figured out micropayments, resisted the urge to provide free content online (hence building expectations that their content would always be free), and blocked the consolidators, they might be better off. Though not by much and not for too long. They're going to have to change or perish, but I'm not sure how. They don't seem to be looking beyond keeping the current workforce employed until retirement. I'd be more sympathetic if I encountered fewer "We're indispensable! Why don't you cretins realize that and carry our asses for another century?" rants
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