Who can write for the love of art: the silenced cost of becoming an author

Can you cheat with authorship without being guilty of conscience? In Nothing is true, the autofiction of the Italian Veronica Raimo, is due because there is a stipulated category to be able to do so: belonging to the “cognitive precariat.” Translated into Spanish by Carlos Gumpert in Libros del Asteroide, in this book inspired by the history of his own family, the protagonist (Veronica, writer) and her brother (also a writer, like her brother in real life, Christian Raimo) have been subcontracting texts without anyone knowing. Specifically, “articles, reviews, prologues, epilogues, opinions of writers on the return of the leggings or the death of the novel, even entire stories or highly inspired verses.” The brothers market to each other with rates “that border on usury” based on the anxiety over the delivery time of whoever signs for the gallery. In one of the cases (“the first time in my life that I became a prostitute,” says the protagonist), her brother will end up writing her a review of a novel for the cultural section of a newspaper that she is anxious about writing because it is hers. same publisher and cannot leave it wrong. The newspaper would end up congratulating her for that text that was never hers, although she never paid for it. She ended up without a trace of guilt for the ruse, but with 500 euros less than her she did enter her brother.

Raimo, who plays in Nothing is true with the invention and reality about his person even in the title of the original Italian (Niente di vero), confirms that if he wrote about these economic tricks it was to desacralize the aura that surrounds writing. “Many writers often say that literature saved them or sank them. They are the ones who talk about demons, obsessions and urgencies, all these metaphysical or grandiose things. They never speak in practical terms. When you see writers in a movie, they usually live in fancy apartments and do nothing but agonize in front of their laptop (or a typewriter!). You don't know how they got there, how they were able to buy that apartment. It all comes down to losing inspiration. “I wanted to write about what is not fascinating, romantic, heroic, or consuming in the process of becoming a writer,” she explains in an email exchange.

Shooting against the mystique of her craft has become a common goal that connects Raimo with a new generation of authors. Allergic to the halo of divinity that accompanies writing, they expose the prosaic in their books, that which no creator seemed to want to get dirty with. They write about money and what it costs to earn it by writing. They wonder who can become a writer today, afford to wait for a payment or make do with a meager advance. Who prioritizes her creative career over caring or responsibilities to those they love. What author can take on those risks without being assured of economic stability? How many stories will remain untold, what will we not get to read because those who were supposed to write it couldn't afford it?

Against the elevated genius

Expanding the path that Tillie Olsen marked in the mid-60s, when in Silences (Las Afueras, 2022) denounced the gaps imposed on women in literary creation, new autofictions and essays demystify and deny the legend of the creative genius. A myth that the 20th century built with the help of the mass media when the evil nature of the selfish and predatory writer was rewarded. The one whose only responsibility and concern were his words. His figure became an ideal of freedom as sexy as it was commercial, with Ernest Hemingway as his pinup boy.

“I blame men for being heirs of romanticized writing,” Mexican Dahlia de la Cerda (Aguascalientes, 38 years old) answers via email. “They are those who had their lives economically resolved, with women who cooked for them and washed their clothes, who could afford to write as an elevated act, as an act typical of geniuses. Those are the ones who told us that the important thing was literature itself, to love the literary act until it hurts. I came to literature from a family of merchants: if I didn't sell, there was no pay. I arrived with that logic, not with that of bourgeois gentlemen who can afford to write for love,” she denounces against the deliberate ignorance of the material aspects of writing.

The author of the publishing phenomenon reserve bitches (Sexto Piso, 2023) defined herself as a “word worker” in her text Why we don't talk about women writers' money (published last summer in the newsletter of S Fashion). “When I say that I like it and I'm interested in it and that my priority as a writer is to capitalize on my work as much as possible, they look at me like a monster, like a capitalist pig. But, for me, dignifying the conditions in which I work, and this includes writing, is political,” explains the co-founder of the feminist collective. Morras Help Morrasin which the mobilization of resources, fundraising and the relationship of activists with money is worked on.

In Spain, authors such as Marta Sanz, Elena Medel or Belén Gopegui have denounced this silence about the material processes of creation in their fictions. These writers are the ones who inspired Bibiana Collado Cabrera to denounce in Exhausted Mares (Pepitas de Calabaza, 2023) that “fiction has traditionally been conservative” and that “the economic circumstance is only relevant if one of the members of the couple is from a different class (what a low-class euphemism) and you have to overcome that lack to achieve union.”

In his autofiction, Collado Cabrera laments that “the nineteenth-century reader in all of us is trained to ignore questions related to money: how many square meters is the protagonist's house? How much will the rent cost in that neighborhood? What is the price of your child
ren's extracurricular activities? […] “Money problems are always generic and not very detailed in the stories,” it denounces in its pages. “I wrote it because I am tired of this invisibility, we should be less afraid to point out certain things, what happens and what conditions us in creation,” she says on the phone about this problem.

“Capitalism has turned art into a luxury that very few can afford,” writes journalist Sarah Jaffe in Work won't love you backan essay that x-rays contemporary work culture and which, for now, has only been translated from English to Catalan (The feina will not appreciate you, published in Ara Llibres). In this text, Jaffe denounces the precariousness and invisibility of the processes dedicated to creative work. “If you are an artist, too often you feel that your work is a luxury and that makes your identity seem like a role in front of the public,” laments a precarious playwright who serves as a source in her book, and the author confirms it in a talk by videoconference from London.

According to this chronicler, this generation has fallen into the trap of believing that it deserved more interesting and creative jobs than industrialized ones, but in the end it ended up working more, exploiting itself while it believed it was being fulfilled. And he has not always ended up creating freely. “What essays would I write if I didn't have to convince someone that they would make money from it if they published it for me? In most cases, you don't sit down and write a book. One writes a proposal that, basically, is: why I think people would buy my book,” says the contributor to media outlets such as Atlantic either New Republic.

For his part, Raimo — who assures that if he writes for magazines it is not to get rich (“it is so poorly paid that it is almost like writing for free, but there is a paradoxical pleasure in doing it, it seems that doing so is the only reward,” he says) — confirms that there is a shift when it comes to focusing on these topics in the books themselves. And there are even those who play poor to succeed more. “I am noticing that now it is cool claim a proletarian origin if you are a writer. For years, writers from the upper classes were the ones who wrote about the upper classes, but now there is an interest in working class literature (the Nobel to Annie Ernaux or the Booker to Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart, have influenced). I think a lot of writers are ashamed of their privilege, so instead of deconstructing it, they make up an alternative origin or an alternative present where they pretend to be poorer than they really are. They complain about money, but from an individual perspective and not a collective one or one that leads them to unionize,” he denounces.

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