Novelist as a Vocation

by Haruki Murakami

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. It is from the correlation of material and vehicle—from their interface, as it were—that new forms of novelistic reality emerge.

Insightful

my principal battleground has been and remains the novel: some may disagree, but I think it is there that my most distinctive—and probably my best—qualities as a writer stand out. My makeup is that of a long-distance runner, which means I need considerable time and distance to pull things together in a full and comprehensive way.

I do disagree

This formula, if it can be called that, pushes me to establish a fixed routine within my life and work—then and only then does writing a full-length novel become possible.

inordinate

The first step in my novel-writing process is, metaphorically, to clean off my desk. My stance is that I will work on nothing but the novel until it is completed, so I need to prepare.

I’m the sort of person who when I throw myself into one thing, can’t do anything else. It’s true that I often work on translations while writing a novel, but those are done at my own pace and without any deadline, and I use them to give me a break from my writing.

(A Distant Drum,

Hadnt heArd of this

Not only did the novel I wrote on this first trip, Norwegian Wood, happen to sell well (far better than I expected), providing me with financial security, it also allowed me to establish a system of writing that I have been able to continue ever since.

Norwegian wood impactful in so mamy ways

When writing a novel, my rule is to produce roughly ten Japanese manuscript pages (the equivalent of sixteen hundred English words) every day. This works out to about two and a half pages on my computer, but I base my calculations on the old system out of habit.

That can’t work if you write a lot one day and nothing at all the next. So I punch in, write my ten pages, and then punch out, as if I’m working on a time card.

Why murakami doesnt work mlre than his quota

Isak Dinesen once said, “I write a little every day, without hope and without despair.”

I wake early each morning, brew a fresh pot of coffee, and work for four or five hours straight. Ten pages a day means three hundred pages a month. That works out to eighteen hundred pages in six months.

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. First, though, I take a short break (it depends on the situation, but usually about one week) before undertaking the first rewrite.

No matter how long the novel is, or how complex its structure, I will have composed it without any fixed outline, not knowing how it will unfold or end, letting things take their course and improvising as I go along. This is by far the most fun way to write. As a result, though, the story is riddled with all sorts of contradictions and inconsistencies. 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. In the process, some lengthy sections may have to be cut back, while other sections may have to be expanded. Entirely new episodes may have to be added.

Another example of just write and then edit. It sounds liberating.

In the case of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I decided that a large chunk of what I had written didn’t fit into the whole, so I excised it and used it as the base for a subsequent novel, 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.

Once I have finished, I take another break and then plunge into the third rewrite.

After all, a novel—like a living, breathing human being—needs to have its loose and sloppy parts. Only that way can the tightly constructed sections achieve their full effect.

This encapsulates murakami novels for me

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.

What this story shows is that, no matter what you have written, it can be made better.

The quality of the time spent doing these things will manifest itself in the persuasiveness of the completed work. It is an invisible process, but the difference it makes is huge.

MucH of writing is an invisible process

Or else just do it to the best of your abilities, your talents, and then don’t justify or make excuses. Don’t complain, don’t explain.

Carver on writing your best

I don’t know how things are at present, but back in the old days there were quite a few Japanese writers who went around bragging that they couldn’t complete a novel unless a deadline was hanging over their heads. This was considered cool in the literati tradition of that era, I guess, but there is a limit to how far that kind of helter-skelter, seat-of-the-pants approach to writing can carry you. You may be able to get away with it when you are young, even turn out some fine work, but it is my impression that a writer’s style becomes strangely impoverished if he carries on like that over the long haul.

When I first started writing Norwegian Wood, I wrote at cafés in various places in Greece, on board ferry boats, in the waiting lobbies of airports, in shady spots in parks, and at desks in cheap hotels. Hauling around oversized, four-hundred-character-per-page Japanese manuscript paper was too much, so in Rome I bought a cheap notebook (the kind we used to call college-ruled notebooks) and wrote the novel down in tiny writing with a disposable Bic pen. I still had to contend with noisy cafés, wobbly tables that made writing difficult, coffee spilling on the pages, and at night in my hotel room when I’d go over what I’d written, sometimes there would be couples getting all hot and heavy beyond the paper-thin walls separating my room from the room next door. Things weren’t easy, in other words.

Wherever a person is when he writes a novel, it’s a closed room, a portable study. That’s what I’m trying to say.

It’s kind of a cliché to say it’s a lonely process, but writing a novel—especially a really long one—is exactly that: extremely lonely work. Sometimes I feel like I’m sitting all alone at the bottom of a well.

Maintaining a set rhythm, steadily hauling in one day after the other and sending them on their way. Silently continue to do this and at a certain point something happens inside you. But it takes time to reach this point. And until then you have to be very patient. One day is just one day. You can’t take care of two or three days’ worth all at once.

A lesson for me

I feel like the act of running represents, concretely and succinctly, some of the things I have to do in this life. I have that sort of general, yet very strong, sense. So even on days when I think I’m not feeling so great and don’t feel like running, I tell myself, “No matter what, this is something I have to do in my life,” and I go out and run without really ascribing a logical reason for it.

Still, when it comes to writing novels, I’m able to maintain the mental toughness needed to sit at a desk for five hours each and every day. This mental toughness—or at least the greater part of it—isn’t something I was born with; it was acquired.

He admits his faults and struggles before making it clear that he has dedicated the energy necessary for this

I have the sense that no one is hoping that a writer lives in a quiet suburb, lives a healthy early-to-bed-early-to-rise lifestyle, goes jogging without fail every day, likes to make healthful vegetable salads, and holes up in his study for a set period every day to work.

True

Life isn’t that easy. If you tilt toward one direction or the other, sooner or later the opposite side will have its revenge. The scales tilting toward one side will inescapably return to where they were. Physical strength and spiritual strength are like the two pairs of wheels of a car. When they’re in balance and are functioning well, then the car operates most efficiently and moves in the optimal direction.

What’s more important is a clear sense of purpose as to why you are studying English (or any other foreign language). If that sense of purpose is vague, then the whole thing becomes pure drudgery.

perfunctory

I was so busy every day enjoying one book after another, digesting them (in many cases not properly digesting them), that I didn’t have any time left to think about anything else. Sometimes I think that might actually have been a good thing for me. If I had looked at the situation around me more, thought deeply about the unnatural, contradictory, and deceitful things there and plunged right into pursuing things I couldn’t accept, I might have been driven into a dead end and suffered because of it.

Not sures if i agree, especially because i effectively did this

People who absolutely love school, and feel sad when they can’t go, probably won’t become novelists. I say this because a novelist is a person who steadily fills his head with a world of his own. When I was in class, I didn’t pay much attention to the lesson, and instead was lost in all sorts of daydreams.

When I think about it, I realize that the novels I enjoy most are the ones with lots of fascinating supporting characters. The one that leaps to mind is Dostoevsky’s Demons.

Makes me think Batuman

Occasionally I’d write short stories in third person, but my novels were consistently in first person. Naturally this “I” didn’t equal me, Haruki Murakami (just like Philip Marlowe isn’t Raymond Chandler), and in each novel the image of the first-person male protagonist changes, but as I continued writing in first person, the line between the real-life me and the protagonist of the novels to a certain extent inevitably blurred, both for the writer and for the reader.

In Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World I used two versions of “I” (using the pronouns boku and watakushi in alternating chapters), which I think was an attempt to break through the functional limits of a first-person narrative.

Interesting

For me it was not simply a change from first-person narrative but close to a fundamental transformation in my standpoint as a writer.

When I write in first person, in most cases I roughly take the protagonist (or narrator) as myself in a broad sense. This isn’t the real me, as I’ve said, but change the situation and circumstances and it might be.

It was as if she were forcibly expanding something inside of me. Looking back on it, it seems that most of the time it’s female characters, not male characters, who lead me and spur me on. Why that is, I have no idea.

Murakami on a character altering his idea of where the story might go

What pops up first for me is the idea for a novel. Then the story naturally, spontaneously reaches out from the idea. As I said in the beginning, it’s the story itself that decides what sort of characters will appear. It’s not something I think about and decide on ahead of time. As the writer, I merely follow directions as a faithful scribe.

When I was writing this first book there was also a sense of it being therapeutic. All creative activity is, to some extent, done partly with the intention to rectify or fix yourself. In other words, by relativizing yourself, by adapting your soul to a form that’s different from what it is now, you can resolve—or sublimate—the contradictions, rifts, and distortions that inevitably crop up in the process of being alive. And if things go well, this effect can be shared with readers. Though I wasn’t specifically conscious of it at the time, I think I was instinctively seeking that kind of self-cleansing action. Which is why, in a very unselfconscious way, I started wanting to write novels in the first place.

The year before I made this decision, I read Ryū Murakami’s novel Coin Locker Babies and was really blown away.

This was a crucial moment in my life. I needed to make a firm decision and stick by it. Even if it was just one time, I wanted to use everything I had to focus on writing a novel. If it didn’t work out, then so be it. I could start all over again. Those were my thoughts then. I sold the café and gave up my apartment in Tokyo in order to concentrate on writing.

My readers are about evenly split between men and women, and apart from the fact that many of my women readers are quite beautiful—this is no lie—there’s no characteristic that they all share.

Wtf

Come to think of it, for the last twenty-five years there have been people who say, “Murakami’s out of step with the times. He’s finished.” It’s easy to criticize—all you have to do is say what you’re thinking, and you don’t have to take any responsibility for anything. For the person who’s being criticized, though, if he takes each and every criticism seriously he’ll never survive. So I’ve concluded, “Whatever. If people are going to say terrible things, then I’m just going to write what I want to write, in the way I want to write it.”

I hear that especially with young women: they’ll be really happy telling their boyfriend, “I got a reply from Haruki Murakami himself!” and their boyfriend will often put a damper on that, telling them, “Don’t be stupid. Murakami’s too busy to write each reply himself. He has someone else write them for him, and just says he writes them himself.”

Wtf

As I mentioned a little earlier, readers of my works seem about equally divided between men and women. I haven’t compiled statistics to back this up, but through meeting and talking with readers, and through the email exchange I mentioned, I get the sense that my readers are about equally male and female. It’s true of Japan, and also seems true abroad. There’s a nice balance. I don’t know why it’s this way, but I get the feeling it’s something I should be genuinely pleased about. The world’s population is about half men and half women, so it’s a natural and healthy thing for my readers to be evenly split as well.

Why doess this read like trump wrote this