An Emilito Explainer

Vivíparo, Ovíparo

These are terms that have been applied to the writing process, as far as Emilito knows, only by the Spanish philosopher/author Miguel de Unamuno.

Escritores vivíparos and escritores ovíparos (Emilito notes that a literal translation would be "viviparous writers" and "oviparous writers," phrases that are not used in English.)


Anthony McCann, in a master's thesis at the National University of Ireland, has a good explanation of the process of the escritor vivíparo

"Despite [Unamuno's] reluctance to establish conventional generic distinctions among his prose works, he has, nevertheless, made one basic distinction which has proved useful to his critics who seek to enhance understanding of his work by identifying and analyzing its basic types.  This is the distinction . . . between what he called an
escritor ovíparo, who does the research into the historical background of his novel, writes preliminary sketches of his characters, and carefully plans the structure of his entire work, and that of the escritor vivíparo, who writes a lo que salga ['according to whatever comes out'], without previous conscious preparation, in a burst of spontaneous creativity."

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