The promiscuous writer

I read something interesting today. David B. Clear, in an article posted on Medium, suggested that a writer could use multiple places at once; forget the fidelity, the pressure to write new content and simply reuse the work built elsewhere. Use different platforms, he said. This echoed some considerations regarding writing that I have had recently. For a while I wondered what led a writer (I mean a good one) to go from the pages of a novel to write newspaper columns in which we see him degrade into an old and disgusting person.

This is what writers live on, those with the best luck are not publishing classist comments in the newspapers; they write prologues, back covers and essays that are published in a few magazines. Some with a bit more luck, because their degradation comes without any public preamble, they read, edit and work behind vast amounts of all that publishing world. Even, I would think, there are some with much more luck who know how to open a field with two or three or four or even all the points expressed and even then continue to publish a book a year. generally these types of people are the most stale of all.

All of us who write go through this. The panorama suggests that some are exhausted halfway and abandon at the first opportunity, some others go blind with a little brightness of the flashes that social networks and cocktails give; very few go to the end. Literature is such a hard and arid road that there are only two types of people who resist it. Some because of the stubbornness to stay, others because this does not represent any loss. Both can be good writers, although the history of literature shows that there is no better inspiration than hunger. In this regard, I always comment on the decisions of George Saunders and Donald Ray Pollock. One left everything to dedicate himself to writing, he jumped into the void. The other took a period of time to try, a sabbatical. His literatures reflect this class condition, which I find interesting (although I doubt it serves as any evidence at all).

So, you have to write a lot. Hopefully some of it will be successful, it will have to be republished on different platforms, republished, re-told. Recycle, write, rewrite; publish and republish. Otherwise there will be frustration at not being able to write anything new. I've been using this for a long time, not because of a productivity issue, but rather because I was wondering, why aren't there more frequent re-readings? Why can you rewatch a movie or television series, or even spend hours a day looking at a painting, but a rereading seems unlikely?

All writing is a work, it should be reviewed in such a way.

What do those who really write write for? Give advice, give an opinion, be beacons of light? How grotesque. In "Share your work," Austin Kleon says that one way out of this rat race is to turn the creative process into content. This is profitable for some people on the internet. Another way to take advantage of the work that is published in physical form. Something curious that I notice about this is that each platform or social network has different dynamics, different scope and generally you do not address the same audience. So why not give it a try? Let's cross the bottom line and turn life itself into a consumer, reproducible and desirable object.

That is, in an empty object.

I have no problem with it. However, in all these years on the net, I really wonder what it means to write on the internet, what really matters (if it matters at all). These friends and communities, the possibility of reading others and learning about their literatures. To know them. This is good, but is it all?

I would like to understand how this works. The metanarrative is a bad reflection at the moment, but only then do I know how to use words. Maybe what I'm trying to say at the end of it all is that this is my leap into the void. I'm tired, there is nothing left but to try.