Publish first, write later
“Literature is perhaps nothing more complicated and glorious than the act of writing and publishing, and publishing again and again.”
- Marcelo Ballvé, on the curious writing career of César Aira
César Aira on the constant flight forward
Argentinian author César Aira’s writing process is more about action than reflection. In a moment I’m going to share with you an extract from The Literary Alchemy of César Aira, an essay by Marcelo Ballvé, originally published in The Quarterly Conversation in 2008.
But before coming to the extract, I’ll just comment on David Kurnick’s claim in Public Books that Aira’s work is primarily about process:
“It is not in the least original to begin talking about César Aira’s work by recounting the technique that produces it. But it can’t be helped: Aira has made a discussion of his practice obligatory. To read him is less to evaluate a freestanding book, or a series of them, than to encounter one of the most extraordinary ongoing projects in contemporary literature.”
True, I’m not being at all original here, just cutting and pasting. Still…
Aira’s own Aleph
It’s as though through his writing Aira has found the basement in Buenos Aires that contains the entire universe in condensed form, the basement that features in Borges’s 1945 story “The Aleph”.
And having found that fabled basement, it’s as though Aira has taken on the persona of Carlos Argentino Daneri, the character in Borges’ story whose life’s obsessive goal is to write a poetic epic describing each and every location on Earth in perfect detail.
But instead of taking the find seriously, Aira parodies it. Everything is here: and what do you know? None of it makes sense! Or, perhaps instead of parodying “The Aleph”, he takes it completely seriously: Why not write about it, about all of it? What then? In an interview in 2017 for the New Yorker, Aira said: “I am thinking now that maybe . . . maybe all my work is a footnote to Borges.”
Of course I’m not just cutting and pasting. I’m writing too. Aira also inspires my own writing process. His example inspires me to choose my own race - and finish it.
One of my role models is the Argentinian author César Aira. He’s written a very large number of novels and novellas (at least 80 - around two to five per year since 1993), published by a variety of presses. That’s a lot of races and a lot of finish lines crossed.
Now here’s Marcelo Ballvé on Aira’s unique writing process.
According to Aira, he never edits his own work, nor does he plan ahead of time how his novels will end, or even what twists and turns they will take in the next writing session. He is loyal to his idea that making art is above all a question of procedure. The artist’s role, Aira says, is to invent procedures (experiments) by which art can be made. Whether he executes these or not is secondary; Aira’s business is the plan, not necessarily the result. Why is procedure all-important? Because it is relevant beyond the individual creator. Anyone can use it.
Aira’s procedure, which he has elucidated in essays and interviews, is what he calls el continuo, or la huida hacia adelante. These concepts might be translated into English as “the continuum,” and a “constant flight forward.” Editing is an abhorrent idea in the context of Aira’s continuum. To edit oneself would be to retrace one’s steps, go backwards, when the idea is to always move forward. To judge yesterday’s writing session, to censor a lapse into the absurd or the irrational, to revive a character your work-in-progress sent tumbling over a cliff—all of these actions go against Aira’s procedure. Instead, the system prioritizes an ethic of creative self-affirmation and, I would say, optimism. To labor to justify previous work with more strange creations that in turn establish the need for ever more artistic high-wire acts in the future—this is the continuum, the high-wire act the artist must perform when he refuses to submit to any rule that is not his autonomously chosen procedure. It is an act performed with deep abysses yawning to each side of him—conformity, market pressures, conventionality, self-repression of all kinds . . . In other words, Aira’s literary career, embodied in each of his 63 novels, is a reckless pursuit of artistic freedom.
Aira says that when he sits down to write his daily page or two, he writes pretty much whatever comes into his head, with no strictures except that of continuing the previous day’s work. (The spontaneous feel of his stories would seem to back up this claim, but I’ve always asked, can anyone write as well as Aira does while simply letting the pen ramble?)
True, his books are very short. Aira says in interviews that he’s often tried to make his novels longer, but they seem to come to a natural rest at around the 100-page mark. Technically, much of what Aira has written would have to be classified in the novella category, but it’s hard to classify Aira’s work within any genre, be it story, novel, or novella. In my mind, Aira’s creations are something different altogether. They are stories, pure and simple, which Aira has managed to ennoble by seeing them into publication in the form of a single book. What he has done is put stories into circulation as objects, which is a defiant feat when seen in the context of a global literary market that demands hefty, sprawling, “big” novels.
The key to Aira’s curious career, I think, is to be found in his conception of literature as something with more affinities to the realm of action than the inner world of reflection. Literature is perhaps nothing more complicated and glorious than the act of writing and publishing, and publishing again and again. Editing is dispensable, so is the search for the “right” publisher. (Aira publishes seemingly with whomever shows any interest in his manuscripts; at least a dozen publishers, most of them small independents, in Argentina alone.) The idea seems to be: publish first and ask questions later…In fact Aira’s mentor, the deceased Argentine poet and novelist Osvaldo Lamborghini had a saying: “Publish first, write later.”
Extracted from The Literary Alchemy of César Aira, by Marcelo Ballvé. The Quarterly Conversation
César Aira’s main publisher in English is New Directions. They’ve published about 21 of Aira’s works in translation, while And Other Stories has published another half-dozen.
Now read: Choose your own race
Whether I’m a tortoise or a hare, or a person who resists anthropomorphizing animals just for the sake of a cheap fable, or even a person who’s uncomfortable with competition metaphors, all the same I’m running my own race. ✍️
Having posted Choose your own race and finish it there’s no excuse now not to boost this:
“What kind of runner can run as fast as they possibly can from the very start of a race?”
Choose your own race and finish it
Are you Hare or Tortoise?
The idea of writing slowly appeals to me because it comes from Aesop’s fable of the hare and the tortoise. Perhaps you remember it.
The hare challenges the tortoise to a race, which he’s obviously the favourite to win. Everyone knows a hare moves much faster than a tortoise. As expected, the hare shoots ahead, then slows for a well-deserved rest, since there’s no way the tortoise will ever catch up. Meanwhile, the tortoise just plods along and eventually passes the hare, who has fallen into a deep sleep by the side of the road. The hare wakes up, just in time to watch the tortoise cross the finish line first.
Now perhaps the moral of the story is something like: slow and steady wins the race. Well, sure, that’s a good moral. And it’s true too: if you just keep on going you’ll achieve far more than if you give up. Obviously.
Another popular interpretation is that ‘pride comes before a fall’. Everyone knew the hare was fast, so why did he have to boast about it? And by trying to beat a tortoise, of all creatures?
I think of myself as someone who hasn’t been quick to publish. I think that because its completely, starkly true. There are others much quicker than me (for example, everyone who ever published). But if publishing quickly is your key metric, there’s now a big problem.
Too fast to keep up
On Amazon there are hundreds or even thousands of genre fiction writers who are writing a novel a month or even faster, just to satisfy the voracious appetite of the algorithm. If they slow down their pace even a little, the site loses sight of them and they risk sinking back down towards obscurity - so all they can do is keep going, writing faster and faster, and with the assistance of AI tools if necessary. In relation to these prolific authors, everyone is writing slowly.
But now that AI has worked out how to tell a coherent story too, the humans, however fast, have no chance. Bots are writing for themselves, and they can write far, far quicker than any human could possibly keep up. If all that matters is quantity, we’re sorted - AI will make mountains of it.
In 2023 for example, the news reported literary journals closing their books to new entries because they were simply overwhelmed by automated entries that the editors couldn’t tell apart from the stories written by humans. And with so many entries they didn’t have time to check anyway1.
So from now on, by most metrics, all humans are writing slowly. Let’s face it, in relation to the machines, we’re second best, no longer gold medal material. It’s enough to induce a bout of Promethean shame.
Each of these moments of innovation involves an emotion similar to what German philosopher Günther Anders called ‘Promethean shame’. This is the feeling that technology is embarrassing us by pointing out our human limitations. We’re just not as good at doing things as the tech that we invented to ‘help’ us do it. In Anders' original formulation the shame arose in the observation of high quality manufactured goods. What was it shame of? That we were born, not manufactured (Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, 1956). In the face of the latest AI panic, we’re asking, yet again: if the tools don’t really need us, what’s the point of humans at all?
Keep your eye on the finish line
But for me, the key message of the fable of the hare and the tortoise isn’t about how you’ll win the race if you just keep going. I don’t really have any problem with keeping going. I’m tenacious and have a lot of inertia. That means I find it hard to start, but equally hard to stop. No, for me the moral of the fable of the hare and the tortoise is quite different.
The story reminds me that I’ve only won when I cross the finish line. Anything else isn’t a victory. That means it’s OK to write slowly, but what I need to keep sight of is finishing something, anything, and shipping it. It’s not enough to actually write, however fast or slow. What matters is publishing, in whatever form, for whatever audience.
But maybe the process is what matters
One of my role models is the Argentinian author César Aira. He’s written a very large number of novels and novellas (at least 80 - around two to five per year since 1993), published by a variety of presses. That’s a lot of races and a lot of finish lines crossed.
Even if you met another Aira fan it would be unlikely you’d both have read the same Aira books, because there are just so many of them. And of course, Aira’s has written a novel called The Hare - but who, even among Aira enthusiasts, has read it? In other words, Aira’s oeuvre is more the record of a particular creative process than it is a body of work to be read in its entirety.
Indeed, the critic Marcello Balvé says Aira’s many novels are “stepping stones, a trail of crumbs leading to a place as close to the molten heart of creation as it is possible to come without burning up.” That’s a bit overheated, but why not2?
Which way are you running?
The story of the hare and the tortoise reminds me too that while I can’t really control my top speed, I can at least control the length and direction of the race I’m running. I often think in terms of writing a whole book, or even a series of books - only to feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the task I’ve set myself.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. Aira only writes short books, but he publishes roughly two a year. A book is made out of chapters, and chapters are built from sections, and sections are made from paragraphs and sentences. In fact, the road to a complete book passes necessarily through a series of completed short pieces, each no harder to write than this one I’m writing right now. I could rein in my ambitions, and publish as I go, one idea at a time.
That way, instead of never completing anything, I’ll always be completing something. And publishing it for you to read, exactly as I’m doing now.
But whether I’m a tortoise or a hare, or even a person who resists anthropomorphizing animals just for the sake of a cheap fable, or even a person who’s uncomfortable with running and competition metaphors, all the same I’m running my own race: watch me win.
More on writing slowly
You can get a lot done by writing slowly
Thoughts are nest-eggs. Thoreau on writing
More on Artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs)
Despite AI, the Internet is still personal
Can AI give me ham off a knee?
More than ever, embracing your humanity is the way forward
Jules Verne could have told us AI is not a real person
Gaslit by machinery that calls itself a person
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In the case of reading magazine submissions, the threat of AI imitating humans is a little overblown. To maintain a manageable slush pile you simply need to introduce some little task that only a human could perform. You could accept only manuscripts that were sent in the mail, for example. This immediately kills the zero-cost proposition of submitting AI-written stories. And when that gets gamed, you could decide to read only those submissions with a hand-written address on the envelope. In other words, if you only want to accept human labour, you just need to request human labour. Re-introduce any human work at all, and the cost benefits of automation are curtailed or even eliminated. ↩︎
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If you’re using crumbs to reach the molten heart of creation, they’ll pretty soon be toast. ↩︎
yeah, no, that didn’t work. Back to the drawing board. Or whatever board is needed for my wicked plans of social media subversion via POSSE to see the success they so richly deserve.
I’m a big fan of the POSSE approach - Post Once, Subvert Social networks Everywhere. I think that’s what it stands for. Anyway, if I’ve done the plumbing correctly, this will appear on BlueSky, micro.blog and Mastodon, as well as writingslowly.com . But then I’m completely unlicenced so we’ll see
Well I’ve signed up to BlueSky. Dislike sociopathic ‘social’ networks at the whim of seed(y) capital. But I really liked what Paul Frazee did with Beaker Browser (RIP). He’s a leading BS creator (that’s unfortunate!), so I’m willing to test it. Just my feed, mind - I’m still writing slowly.
A history of thinking on paper
It’s hard to describe how exciting it was to receive in the mail this morning: The Notebook by Roland Allen! 📚
The subtitle is excellent: A History of Thinking on Paper. This reminded me of Walter Ong’s claim about the decisive impact of writing, as a technology, upon the very shape of thought:
“Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.” ― Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
And of Niklas Luhmann’s more personal 1 version:
“It is impossible to think without writing; at least it is impossible in any sophisticated or networked (anschlußfähig) fashion." ― Communicating with Slip Boxes. An Empirical Account, 1992.
Index cards, that other excellent tool for thinking on paper, scarcely get a mention, overshadowed as they are here by notebooks. But at least the single mention is significant, since it concerns the research methods of Linnaeus:
”As he accumulated ever more data, he he moved on to index cards, which - unlike bound notebooks - allowed for an infinite number of new entries to be added to his catalogues.” (p. 244)
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personal in that it shows Luhmann didn’t imagine a sophisticated non-literate culture, of which, nevertheless, there are many. I take it he was writing mainly about himself. ↩︎
Finished reading: Movement by Thalia Verkade 📚This is for everyone who’d like to get around their home town better.
In eight different ways, to have a friend is to be one
A few years ago, Barking Up The Wrong Tree reflected on research 1 that identified the eight different kinds of friends you need. But it struck me that this is really a primer on the eight different kinds of friend you need to be to others.
Remember the old saying, “to have a friend is to be one”? Well there’s more than one way you can be a friend to someone and you’re probably not making the most of all your opportunities here. I’m not saying you should try to cover all the bases. It’s unlikely any one person could really fulfill all the eight roles to best effect. Instead, I’m using this as a checklist to reflect on:
- the friendship roles I’m good at,
- the roles I’m bad at, and
- the roles I’d like to focus more on.
I’m also using this as a way of being more reflective about what my various friends actually need from me. For example, I tend to do a lot of ‘mind-opening’, but actually, this may not always be very useful. If I’m honest, it might well just be annoying.
“What do you need right now?” might be a good phrase to practice!
Eight ways to be a friend
- The Builder
- The Champion
- The Collaborator
- The Companion
- The Connector
- The Energizer
- The Mind Opener
- The Navigator
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Well, Tom Rath’s 2006 book, Vital Friends. ↩︎