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JANUARY 2025
★ 1 ★
Journos are at it again Un artículo de Aceprensa dice: «Para José Francisco Serrano, catedrático de Periodismo de la Universidad CEU San Pablo y directivo de la Asociación de Prensa de Madrid, un periodista “es una persona que asume la delegación de la sociedad para trabajar con una serie de criterios de carácter técnico y deontológico en la transmisión de la información y de las ideas en la sociedad”».
He ahí el origen de la arrogancia del periodista: se cree que ha recibido una “delegación” de la sociedad, y no hay tal; a través del proceso democrático hay una delegación a los políticos, con la consabida constante decepción que son. ¿Anhelan ser algo similar los periodistas? Esa sería la fuente de su arrogancia de creer tener algún insight peculiar en cómo debería manejarse una sociedad.
El panadero no ha recibido “una delegación de la sociedad para hacer pan”; simplemente se arriesga a venderlo, y si es bueno y el barrio lo necesita, tendrá clientes. Lo mismo los periodistas, que como explicamos hace años,es un ciudadano más usando su libertad de expresión; si lo hace bien y logra tener audiencia y prestigio, se convertirá en referente; si no, no, y la sociedad no tiene ningún “deber de creerle” por el solo hecho de ser periodista.
★ 2 ★
Don’t say “hello” A short Medium article recommends skipping “hellos” because it could sound scammy in this day and age, and because “It’s throat-clearing. When I was a freelance writer years ago, an editor took one of my articles and slashed out 20% with his red pen. ‘Stop clearing your throat,’ he said. ‘It’s boring to read. Cut out that filler and get to the point’.”
It left me thinking: create setting or move the plot! Something must happen! There's no time for long-winded descriptions, what with our short attention spans.
★ 3 ★
Two or three trick ponies Brian Collins on Medium narrates what Jon Batiste, a musician, told when interviewed by Tim Ferris: “People, whether creative or not… have two, maybe three ideas in life. We have two ideas that we are constantly refining, recreating, presenting. Refining, recreating, presenting. And it’s your life’s idea set.”
Isn’t that right? My two ideas would be: 1) Education could easily be improved if it were personalized; and 2) there are A LOT of structural problems with the Ecuadorian government, and the first discussion of policy, should be addressing them beforehand.
Of course these ideas of mine are met with total indifference by my friends, family and the public at large; but that’s another problem, haha.
It says: «27. Develop a Willingness to Be Disliked. This will grant you the freedom to do what needs to be done, even if it’s unpopular. 28. You Cannot Be a Life-Changing Presence to Some People Without Also Being a Complete Fucking Joke to Others. Part of the price of having impact is some hate. And usually that hate is proportional to the impact.»
It describes my experience with my “two ideas” presented before: as much as I try to share them, people not only reject them, but get incensed, even when I show they work, or maybe precisely because they do work!
The only hope is that for a little while I showed a few people that some other way of living is possible. I floated ideas for others to see a better possible world. After all, we don’t have ideas, but ideas have us, remember?
We must be sacrificed in order for our ideas to live on!
★ 5 ★
Another good Medium article with good re-read value has many important remarks on writing:
I’m using the word story here to stand for a complete essay with a beginning, middle, and end, where the writer overcomes some obstacle, a truth is learned, or some other sort of meaningful shit occurs. An anecdote is just something that happened — an incident. You go to the dentist and someone says something funny. It might be an amusing bit for the dinner table, but it’s not a story because you haven’t made it one yet.
This is the difference between retelling something that happened to you and what a writer does. If something crazy happens to a normal person, they have been gifted a story. A writer creates stories out of the flotsam and jetsam of life. We take the mundane and bring it to life. We make it a story. You can’t wait for life to drop gold in your lap, you have to be an active participant in seeking it out.
A professional photographer makes a photo, they don’t capture one. Anyone can take a good picture in perfect circumstances. The difference between a pro and an amateur is that a pro can do it on demand, and do it every time no matter what the conditions. The amateur needs all the planets to be aligned.
Every time I see one of those “nofilter” hashtags, I think, “What a schmuck.” Pros use filters to trick the camera into revealing what our eyes see.
That tells the truth on the trade!: use your talent to turn something mundane into interesting. For those of us who lack literary talent, there's always the plot twists & conflict we've mentioned before.
Speaking of drama:
In my experience, the travel story where everything is lovely and nothing bad happens is a complete waste of everyone’s time. It’s like showing us your Instagram feed from Jamaica. Why do we give a damn about the vacation you took? You gave us nothing. We learned nothing. You just made us watch your shitty home movies. Writing flaccid travel stories where nothing happens is the modern equivalent.
Ha! Well put. Inside we all are a little mean & envious—“Not a very masculine trait, envy” used to say a former friend—and we couldn't care less for those perfect portrayals on social media. "So you're so affluent and you were having fun? Well, F U!" But we're drawn to drama & conflict—negativity bias, I suppose—and guess what? There's always drama & conflict underneath those picture-perfect portrayals on social media!
He goes on: «When I do sit down to write, I never start at the beginning. We left for the airport at 6 am. I begin by writing a scene in the middle that struck my fancy. I need that first sentence to tell me what it’s about, or at least where I want it to go. The story doesn’t always cooperate.» Hear, hear! That’s a good tip, to just “throw” the reader into the middle of a scene, and build from there.
More often than not, I start with the title and the subtitle. They provide a pretty good roadmap for where I think I’m going. While they are quite likely to change before I’m finished, this helps to guide me. What do I think I’m trying to say? It can change, but you have to start somewhere.
It doesn’t really matter what the story is, it has to connect to some part of my life so that I’m interested and engaged. Something learned or remembered, a piece of literature or a movie scene, a bit of information that connects the dots for me to a larger truth about myself and the world in which I live. The event — the anecdote — is merely the catalyst for bringing that idea forward. What did this experience teach me about myself and the sweaty mass of humanity swirling around me?
That sounds like a good tool to break away from writer’s block: begin in the middle of an anecdote, with a title and subtitle as guides, and weave the story from there.
I’m always looking for an emotional connection with the reader. It might be anger, disgust, romance, love, hate, fear, or hope. It’s all grist for the mill. I don’t intentionally set out to make the reader feel a particular way.
I’ve always considered writers who are able to make you feel things, the best; the ones who can plant you in a roller-coaster of emotions whether you like it or not, the ones who use their talent to do as they please with the reader. But those are the masters. Us humble hacks have to make do with our limited talents:
I might be asking them to join me on a little journey and experience the emotional roller coaster we’re on. Other times, it’s clear that I’m out of my gourd and I’m simply spinning out for their amusement. Sometimes, I’m just revealing how cracked and broken I am because that’s how I feel that day and I know that many others feel the same and will relate.
I realize that sounds like a lot of emotional woo-woo. What I’m trying to pull out of you is this: What does that boat ride you took have to do with me? It doesn’t have anything to do with you, you say, it’s my story. Ah, so you want me to be engaged with something I have no interest or involvement in?
If we can’t relate to your story, we stop reading. But if you give me details that grab my attention, and reveal a certain amount of vulnerability, humanity, and personal connection, I can empathize and suddenly I’m not watching from the shore. I’m in the boat with you.
As I say, my writing goal is “words that are better than silence.” To entertain, to teach…, to make the reader’s time worthwhile.
When you take a small story and begin to relate it to your own life and experiences, suddenly you have all these possible paths to explore. Suddenly, it has the ability to become a much larger story. It gives you the space to have your own character arc, with a beginning, middle, and end. You are met with an obstacle, work to overcome it, possibly with the help of a guide, and are transformed somehow in the end. A classic story structure.
That’s the beauty of creativity, or “having ideas make love” as James Altucher used to say: you get new baby ideas.
I enjoy a darkly funny trip of misery into the mundane. When I’m in full writer mode, I’m game for anything, the worse the better. If you’re open to the story of your life, you’ll see things you never saw before, and notice things you never noticed. Look forward to that tedious chore or errand. There’s gold out there waiting to be mined.
When I’m open, I talk to people, random people, service people. They’ll tell you all manner of crazy shit if you just bother to be friendly and ask them questions about themselves. You won’t believe how quickly they’ll spill their guts. The trick is to remember to get into writer mode when you walk out the door. It makes the world such a more interesting place.
That’s another interesting concept: “writer mode”! That way we could hopefully get rid of crippling social anxiety and shyness, and encourage creativity in a newly-discovered, magic world full of wonders. In “writer mode,” not only the world will be a more interesting place, but the writer himself!
I’m fascinated by openings. Opening sentences and paragraphs. For me, it’s an amalgamation of ad copy, literature, poetry, and song lyrics, but with a purpose. It’s an exciting opportunity to really craft something special. A perfect combination of intrigue and wordplay that entices the reader to carry on. When I’m writing fiction, I begin each chapter as if it’s the beginning of the book. You can do the same thing in your essays.
Very important to remember in these times of short attention spans!
You’ve written your anecdote down to the best of your ability, and it’s good, but it’s not enough. What do you do now? Where do we go from here? I hit return and then type three asterisks in a row “***” and then I begin again. Forget what came before. Start fresh. What’s the next chapter of the story? Tell another story about a similar experience, or begin with some exposition about what the previous act meant to you. You don’t have to know where you’re going yet. Your mind will fill in the details.
What did the first part remind you of? What movie, song, poem, memory, or arcane piece of knowledge does it evoke for you? Start there and see where it takes you. As you write, things pop into your mind and you chase them for a while. You’ll reach dead ends and have to go back a paragraph or two and begin again. I’ve taken six to eight paragraphs out of this piece already, one at a time, because each one was getting off course. I don’t delete them. I cut and paste them into another document to be used later. I have two to three more essays already waiting for me. I waste nothing.
It surely seems he knows what he’s talking about!
In my experience, if you’re having trouble writing, you’re not reading enough. It’s good to read a wide range of things, but if you’re working on a personal essay, read personal essays. If you’re writing fiction, read fiction. My biggest problem with getting through books is that I’m constantly stopping to write something down. I’ll read six pages and a lightbulb will go off and I’m off and running, writing about something of my own.
I’m not sure I’ll follow this advice right now—there’s so much to read!—but it surely is a good suggestion to get rid of writer’s block: submerge your mind in content similar to what you're trying to create, and it’ll give you something similar.
Your job as a writer is to find connections in the world, between people and ideas, between you and the reader. I heard Judd Apatow say that he was fascinated by comedians as a kid because they appeared to have figured something out about the world and had come to some insight concerning our predicament. They had answers. That’s how I view the job of the writer. We’re thinkers and we have some of the answers. We have the gold. Everyone wants the gold.
Emphasis my own. We have the gold! We’re the (self appointed) thinkers of society!
Getting rejected 100 times in a year means one rejection every three-and-a-half days, on average. When you add acceptances into the mix, that means submitting something almost every single day. And what happens when you do something every day? 1) You form habits, making it a routine and thus, easier to follow through. 2)You build skills — in this case, becoming better at writing, following submission guidelines, and handling rejections. 3)You learn what works (and what doesn’t), leading to more acceptances. Putting in the work to get 100 rejections from literary journals will inevitably boost your creative output, but also the quality of the work itself.
Rejections aren’t personal, they’re business decisions. Accumulate enough of them, and you learn the business: what sells, what kind of titles editors love, what sort of opening line grabs a reader, etc.
She quotes another article that expands on this point:
In the book Art & Fear, authors David Bales and Ted Orland describe a ceramics class in which half of the students were asked to focus only on producing a high quantity of work while the other half was tasked with producing work of high quality. For a grade at the end of the term, the “quantity” group’s pottery would be weighed, and fifty pounds of pots would automatically get an A, whereas the “quality” group only needed to turn in one—albeit perfect—piece. Surprisingly, the works of highest quality came from the group being graded on quantity, because they had continually practiced, churned out tons of work, and learned from their mistakes. The other half of the class spent most of the semester paralyzed by theorizing about perfection, which sounded disconcertingly familiar to me—like all my cases of writer’s block.
That’s an interesting paradox!: to succeed, you must fail a lot first! This echoes of the pick-up artists of two decades ago—God, time flies!—who some at first recommended going intently for the rejection on purpose, so as to desensitize and build up confidence. It also might be similar to Viktor Frank’s paradoxical intention.
She finishes with another quote: “The worst book you’ve ever read was published.” It’s true! You’ve surely read really bad writing. How bad can yours be in comparison?
★ 7 ★
Clase media Interesante caracterización de la clase media en el paisito, según un artículo de El Universo: «para ser considerado de clase media se debe ganar en el país entre 2,5 y 12,5 veces más de la línea de pobreza mensual establecida en 2024 en 91,55 dólares (la última línea calculada oficialmente y que corresponde a junio del año pasado). Es decir, todas las personas que son parte de hogares cuyos ingresos mensuales oscilan entre $ 228,87 y $ 1.144,37 por cada miembro serían considerados como parte de la clase media».
Dice «por cada miembro», ¿no? Tenía la duda de si el cálculo de “clase media” iba por el lado de los ingresos del trabajador familiar, o más bien por los niveles de consumo, en los que participan incluso niños y ancianos.
«La canasta básica familiar para un núcleo de cuatro miembros (padres y dos hijos) fue fijada en 797,97 dólares en diciembre de 2024, lo que implica que para cubrirla se necesitan casi 200 dólares por cada miembro de ese hogar promedio», continúa. Es decir, que si la familia “tipo” cubre los ingresos de la canasta básica, ¿podemos considerarla clase media? Debajo de esa categoría serían los “vulnerables”, no aún pobres pero en riesgo de caer en pobreza.
Anteriormente tenía la impresión que la caracterización de clase media era basada en condiciones de vida: si la casa posee piso de baldosa, baño completo con agua corriente, internet, celular, etc.
«El camino sería fortalecer al 31,7 % de la población del país que se considera son parte de la clase media, según estimaciones del Banco Mundial, en la que se incluye como tales a los que ganan entre $ 15 y $ 70 al día, es decir, de $ 465 a $ 2.170 al mes», sigue el artículo. Ahí estaría entonces el ingreso del trabajador que sostiene un hogar de clase media: si tiene empleo adecuado (es decir, si gana por lo menos el básico) hasta $2170 mensuales; a partir de ahí ya se sería “clase alta”, es decir, un nivel de ingresos individual de alrededor de más de los mil dólares por miembro familiar mencionados en el primer párrafo. Obviamente son categorías un poco difusas, pero sirven de referencia.
Un estudio del Fondo Monetario Internacional elaborado con información estadística del INEC mostraba que el 90 % de la población económicamente activa gana hasta 750 dólares al mes. Y el 60 % del total apenas logra ingresos de hasta $ 250 al mes. Una parte de este grupo es considerado pobre en la estadística oficial (en junio de 2024 eran 4,7 millones de personas, 25,5% de la población total) y la otra parte queda en el medio, lo que se conocería como clase media baja, un grupo vulnerable que está más cerca de pasar a engrosar la pobreza oficialmente en momentos de precariedad laboral e imposibilidad de generar ingresos.
Si hasta >90% ganan ~$750 al mes, y algo así como tan sólo 1,7% de la población es clase alta (ingresos familiares de más de $4k al año), entonces en esa diferencia de 8,3% están los más “medios” de la clase media, y siendo que 4% gana más de $2k al mes [V.], lo cual incluye a la clase alta, la clase “media comfortable” sería tan sólo algo así como el 6% de la población.
Por supuesto eso variará según si el trabajador sea un joven profesional soltero, o ya tenga cargas familiares. Pero en general somos un país de bajos ingresos.
Otro artículo de Revista Gestión de hace unos cuantos años toma un enfoque distinto, hablando de “contribuyentes” en vez de trabajadores, pues usa datos del SRI en vez del INEC, pero llega a conclusiones similares.
Según este dataset sólo el 10% de la población gana $1500 o más; nos llama la atención que el umbral sea el doble del del INEC, pero es lo que hay, y está mejor desglosado:
La explicación sería que el INEC se enfoca en hogares con el consabido 1,6 de ingresos, pero en cambio el SRI se enfoca en contribuyentes que son individuales por naturaleza. Quizá ahí se explique la mayor parte de la diferencia.
En el caso de los quintiles por ingresos, fácilmente vemos que la mayor parte de la población de Ecuador es de bajos ingresos:
Y sí, en el último quintil están los millonarios, pero “arrastrados” hacia ese promedio bajo por una inmensa mayoría que gana el mínimo o poco más.
Esos datos, como dijimos, son de 2024, cuando enfrentábamos la plandemia y la desastrosa cuarentena. Pero cuatro años después los datos no son mejores, y por lo menos por mera inflación deberían serlo, pero no es así; nos hemos empobrecido un poco:
Alégrense los zurdos, quienes “sufrieron” una mayor caída porcentual fueron “los ricos” del último quintil! 😜
Reitero: la inmensa mayoría de trabajadores gana mucho menos que el mínimo vital, y lo único que logra la ley es arrojarlos a la informalidad. Eso no es conveniente a sus intereses ni les beneficia.
Los datos del SRI (de hace 4 años, recordemos) asignan a la clase alta el 1,9%, muy similar al INEC actual. Concluye con desolación que muy poca gente en el paisito está en condiciones de pagar impuesto a la renta; la conclusión lógica sería que no estamos entonces en condiciones de proveer un “estado de bienestar nórdico”, pues nuestro nivel de ingresos no nos lo permite; los ricos son muy, muy pocos.
Pero insisto, se debe enseñar al pueblo a que algo deben pagar, así sea muy poco; el “todo debe ser gratis” es caldo de cultivo de populismo y demagogias, pues es imposible. Siempre recuerdo el “plan de aseguramiento popular” de Matraca Nebot de hace 20 años, que por un puñado de dólares brindaba acceso a consultas y un cuadro básico de medicinas.
Más allá de lo magro del servicio, la pedagogía del poder era lo más valioso a rescatar: “la atención de salud cuesta, y te vamos a ayudar, pero tú debes aportar algo también”. El correísmo interrumpió ese proceso de aprendizaje y engañó a toda una generación con el “todo debe ser gratis y el Máximo Líder sí puede hacerlo”.
Esperemos que pronto se retome el camino de que todos deben ayudar a sostener los escasos servicios que podemos permitirnos como sociedad.