Live to write

A box arrived. About the size of a suitcase, the box contained the seven volumes of my collected Writings plus the two volumes of my novel Recovering Eden and an extra volume which collects my Diary (entries beginning with Hurricane Sandy in 2011 up through the end of 2014) and Footnotes, my writings about soccer. In total, about 5000 pages of material. Now what? Keep writing, I suppose.

Next Monday I’ll be going with Rasan to the Cervantes Institute in Manhattan to see César Aira and Sergio Chejfec. Last night, Aira was at Greenlight Books. If I lived in the city, I would have tried to attend that event too. Ever since I chanced upon a copy of Aira’s An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter in an indy bookstore in Philadelphia, I’ve been fascinated not only by Aira’s work, but how he goes about writing his books. In fact, I’ve adopted “the Aira method” for writing my own books. Briefly, the Aira method is to write a single page (front and back) of text, write the words out longhand so that typing will naturally lead to one rewriting step. Don’t write more than a single page. Stop when you fill the back page even if you have more to write. Save it for tomorrow. You have other things to do with your life. Writing is part of your life, not the whole of it.

Later (the same day ideally), you type out what you’ve written by longhand over a cup of coffee at the café earlier that morning. Whatever you write on that day has to seamlessly fit together with what you wrote the previous day (unless you are starting a new project). Write for as many days as it takes to complete the book. A book should only be as long as it needs to be. Everything goes into the work. But draw from your imagination.

Working like this, I spend between 90 minutes and two hours each day adding to my work in progress. Then for the rest of the day I can do whatever I want: work, blog, read, play soccer, drink a beer a the pub with my friends. In short, I live to write. “Live to Write” is also the title of the series of talks by writers at the Cervantes Institute.

My therapist, Dr Pasavento, doesn’t wholly understand my compulsion to write. He warns that I should not fall into the trap of writing to live. I’m not yet old enough to retreat from the world and hold up in my study writing the memoirs of my life like Casanova.

I’ve just read Tom McCarthy’s essay which was published in the Guardian on the 7th of March. The essay is called “The death of writing — if James Joyce were alive today he’d be working for Google.” Even though I’m a “blogger” I have no desire to be a “first responder” but there are statements in McCarthy’s essay, ideas he describes which seem worthy of wrestling with. “Fiction in the age of data saturation…” reminds me of an essay by Jonathan Frazen published in Harper’s nearly twenty years ago. Maybe I should reread that too and see if these two reports offer any guidance for the writer of fiction today.