(2023-11-26) Choose Your Own Race And Finish It

WritingSlowly: 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.

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?

I think of myself as someone who hasn’t been quick to publish. I think that because its completely, starkly true.

But if publishing quickly is your key metric, there’s now a big problem.

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

now that AI (LLM) has worked out how to tell a coherent story too, the humans, however fast, have no chance.

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.

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). 2023-11-28-PublishFirstWriteLater

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.