Graham Harman has been posting a series of enlightening thoughts on writing as he races toward a book deadline, taking only two months from start to finish. The book in question has a word limit (a character limit, really) because it is destined for immediate translation, and the translation has to be done on a budget.

The whole series is worth a read, both for experienced writers and new ones. I'd like to draw attention to today's post in particular, though, because in it Harman draws a connection between Nick and my book Racing the Beam, which Graham read just before I met up with him in Cairo in early July, and his own work.

With this book [Harman's ms in progress] I’m in a similar position to Atari programmers or weapons miniaturizers. Never have I packed this many of my ideas into a mere 70 double-spaced pages (the final 70 pages will be largely new material that none of my readers have ever seen before). Many of the cuts have been painful, of the order of: “my God, will the argument even make sense if I remove that step?”

But more often than not, compression and allusiveness can be made to work. This book is certainly going to have a very rapid pace, like a high-speed film of a horse running.

Harman's right that Racing the Beam is about constraint in general as much as (perhaps even more than?) it's about the Atari VCS. Indeed, I've been outlining a new project entirely devoted to the concept of constraint, and it's motivating to hear that the idea is helpful.

In academic writing, we usually don't have many external constraints. In fact, it's not uncommon to hear scholars complain that university presses have become less willing to publish books over 300 pages or so. But now that I've written a few books, I welcome length constraints, and even impose them on myself.

I think Unit Operations is about 80,000 words. Persuasive Games is around 150,000 words. Racing the Beam weighed in right at 60,000, I believe, and it felt like the right size for a book, both physically and conceptually. I don't know that I'd never strive to write a long and involved book again, but right now, I'm very interested in the 40,000 - 60,000 word work. Incidentally, that's about the size of a typical trade non-fiction book. Maybe there's a reason for that.