Novelist as a Vocation

by Haruki Murakami

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. In the field of human endeavor, things that seem mundane at first glance can, if you persevere, give birth to an endless array of insights. All you need to do, as I said before, is retain your healthy writerly ambition. That is the key.

Recent research shows that aerobic exercise leads to a rapid increase in the number of neurons produced in the hippocampus in the brain. Aerobic exercise is sustained exercise such as swimming or jogging. However, if left as is, in twenty-eight hours these newly formed neurons will disappear without having served any purpose. It’s a real waste. But give these newly formed neurons some intellectual stimulation and they are activated—they connect with the network in the brain and become an organic part of the signal-transfer community. In other words, the network within the brain becomes broader and denser. The ability to learn and remember is elevated.

characters who are—in a real sense—alive will eventually break free of the writer’s control and begin to act independently. I’m not the only one who feels this—many fiction writers acknowledge it. In fact, unless that phenomenon occurs, writing the novel becomes a strained, painful, and trying process. When a novel is on the right track, characters take on a life of their own, the story moves forward by itself, and a very happy situation evolves whereby the novelist just ends up writing down what he sees happening in front of him. And in some cases the character takes the novelist by the hand and leads him or her to an unexpected destination.

in reality, down deep in the ground, in a place that penetrates below the hard crust of everyday life, we are, novelistically, connected. Deep within our hearts we share a common narrative. That’s probably the type of reader I assume.

by, to put it another way, allowing movement between the objective world and the subjective world so they mutually modify each other—people are able to accept an uncertain reality and maintain their sanity.