Novelist as a Vocation

by Haruki Murakami

This helps explain why he led the type of life he did, moving from one war to another (the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War), hunting big game in Africa, fishing for big fish, falling in love with bullfighting. He needed that external stimulus to write. The result was a legendary life; yet age gradually sapped him of the energy that his experiences had once provided.

Nobel Prize for Literature

I’m saying is that they needn’t be of the dramatic variety to make a good novel. Even the smallest, most nondramatic encounter can generate an astonishing amount of creative power, if you do it right.

So if you lament that you lack the material you need to write, you are giving up way too easily. If you just shift your focus a little bit and slightly alter your way of thinking, you will discover a wealth of material lying about just waiting to be picked up and used. You only have to look.

computer language.

1979,

In the end, I think each new generation has its own fixed amount of material that it can use to write novels, and that the shape and relative weight of that material retroactively determine the shape and function of the vehicle that must be designed to carry it.

material

vehicl...

So if your aim is to write fiction, take a close look around you. The world may appear a mundane place, but in fact it is filled with a variety of enigmatic and mysterious ores.

In my many years as a professional writer, I have written works of varying sizes in a wide variety of literary forms.

(1Q84,

After ...

Still, when all is said and done, I consider myself first and foremost a writer of full-length novels.

Short stories are agile vehicles that can be maneuvered to cover the smaller topics that novels can’t handle very well.

Nevertheless—and here I must stipulate that I am speaking only for myself—the form does not give me the room to express all that is within me in the way I want.

It strikes me that, at the risk of exaggeration, long novels are my lifeblood, while short stories and novellas are more like practice pieces, important and useful steps toward the construction of longer works.

So let me now talk about how I compose my novels. More specifically, I would like to speak generally about how I write, using my long novels as concrete examples.

clean off my desk.

I’m the sort of person who when I throw myself into one thing, can’t do anything else.

“This all sounds very fine and dandy,” a fellow writer may counter, “but the fact is, we have to take on other sorts of projects to survive.

At a certain point in my career, I began to do a good deal of my writing abroad, the reason being that there were just too many trivial distractions in Japan.

It seems that for me, living elsewhere is especially helpful in the crucial early stages of a novel, when I am setting up my daily routine, establishing the kind of schedule I need to write.

In any case, my big decision to explore the possibilities abroad and leave Japan behind turned out to be the right one.

Norwegian Wood,

At the risk of sounding arrogant, things turned out the way they did because I was so determined, and also prepared to take the consequences.

When writing a novel, my rule is to produce roughly ten Japanese manuscript pages (the equivalent of sixteen hundred English words) every day.

That’s not how an artist should go about his art, some may say.

It sounds more like working in a factory. And I concur—that’s not how artists work. But why must a novelist be an artist? Who made that rule? No one, right? So why not write in whatever way is most natural to you? Moreover, refusing to think of oneself as an artist removes a lot of pressure.

More than being artists, novelists should think of themselves as “free”—“free” meaning that we are able to do what we like, when we like, in a way we like wi...

Isak Dinesen

Kafka on the Shore

Swallows’ championship

Unlike baseball, however, no sooner has one season (the first draft) ended than a new one begins: that of rewriting. No time is better spent than the time I spend rewriting, and nothing is more fun.

Characters may radically change partway through. The timeline may become tangled. These glitches must be fixed if the novel is to flow smoothly in a comprehensible manner.

Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,

South of the Border, West of the Sun.

This rewrite usually takes a month or two. When I finish, I break for another week or so and then begin the second rewrite.

As with the first rewrite, I start at the head and work my way through. The difference is that now I focus on the details of the manuscript, fine-tuning passages of natural description, for example, and adjusting the tone of the dialogues. I check to ensure that nothing in the plot is out of place, that hard-to-read sections are made easier, and that the story flows smoothly and naturally.

third rewrite.

Novels are, by definition, longer works, which means the reader can be stifled if the screws are too tight.

At this stage of the game, I take a longer break. For two weeks to a month, if possible, I stick the manuscript in my desk drawer and forget it. At least I try to.

Once the novel has fully settled, it is time for another detailed and exhaustive run-through. Thanks to my time away, my impressions of the work will have changed quite a lot. Weaknesses I haven’t noticed before jump out at me. I can sense what has depth and what doesn’t. Just as the work has settled, so too has my state of mind.

Once the settling period is over and the subsequent rewrite completed, I move on to the next step. By this point, the novel has assumed what will be more or less its final form, so I can show it to a first reader—namely, my wife.

This may make some people angry, but although literary editors in Japan are specialists, in the end they are company employees who can be reassigned at any time.

my wife

(I have to say “for the most part”—understanding one’s wife completely is fundamentally impossible.)

There are times when I come to accept her criticisms. “Yeah, she was right about that,” I may think, or “Maybe she had something there.”

Whichever course I have followed, once I have sat down and rewritten a given section I almost always find it much improved.

This time I don’t have to go through the manuscript from beginning to end. All I have to do is rewrite those problematic sections.