The writing routine of César Aira
From the introduction to César Aira's recently published collection of short stories, Five, this excerpt from the introduction is written by Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer:
César Aira coined the term “the flight forward” (huir hacia adelante) to describe his deceptively simple writing process. Every morning he writes for one hour at a local Buenos Aires café and then in the evening he types up that morning’s work on his computer, and once that’s done, there is no editing or revision—no polishing, no going back to fix continuity errors in retrospect; there is none of the labor of “the writer’s craft.” About his morning routine, he explained in an interview why a noisy café is perfect for him:
The coffee shop is the ideal environment to write because I can write there for an hour (it’s all I need to complete the day’s work) since I only have my Montblanc and my notebook with me, while at home I have books to read, music to listen to, movies to watch, my wife to chat with. In my house there is always something more important to do than write. They ask me how I can concentrate in a coffee shop full of noise and movement and with the spectacle of the street on the other side of the windows. It happens that to write, to write what I write, I need to de-concentrate. Concentration would lead me inexorably to the tedious subject matter of my own boring life.
And, given the stipulation in the flight forward against revisions, since mistakes cannot be fixed, they must be incorporated into the whole as the novel progresses, making an Aira book always surprising, even (or especially) to himself. The resulting pull of his fiction’s compulsive, ever-fresh flow along unusual narrative channels feels somehow at once both organic and precise. Perhaps it is Aira living so fully in the moment—catching his thoughts in midair as he writes his scenes—that makes life itself, in all its random strangeness, come so startlingly alive on his pages. And while Aira’s process relies on improvisation and incorporates chance events—a bird, for example, flew into Aira’s café while he was writing, and he worked it into the story—the fruits of his technique feel far from haphazard. If Raymond Roussel’s feverishly detailed machines are a touchstone for Aira, so is the rigorous observation of Balzac’s Comédie Humaine. Aira combines an innate genius for fiction with a humbling erudition—he’s read everything, and translated much of it, from Shakespeare to Steven King—which is how he can, before our very eyes get away with his flights. Any process is, in theory, replicable, but applying Aira’s would end the career of most writers.