A bird flew into César Aira's café while he was writing, so he wrote the bird into the story. That image, from a Paris Review appreciation of what it calls Aira's "art of not editing," reads like a small manifesto. Most of us treat interruption as the enemy of good work. Aira treats it as a collaborator. And once you notice that instinct, welcoming chance into the room turns out to be one of literature's oldest and most quietly radical habits — a thread running through nearly everything worth reading this week.
Aira's method, as the Paris Review tells it, is to keep moving forward and let the world's intrusions stay on the page rather than sanding them away. The bird is not a mistake to be corrected; it is a gift to be used. That is a harder discipline than it sounds, because it means trusting the accident over the plan.
You can hear the same logic in voice-driven fiction. JSTOR Daily's roundup of "Six Stories with First-Person Narrators" praises their distinctive voices and unforgettable perspectives — and a first-person voice is, in the end, the residue of one unrepeatable person meeting one unrepeatable set of circumstances. The quirks we might be tempted to edit out are often exactly what make a narrator sound alive. Chance, rendered as character.