Complex Numbers

How To Write

I finally managed to set up my new computer today. Fortunately, my bookmarks seem to have transferred with no problem. Thus, I continue to talk about articles I've found online.

This one is about writing.

What’s Needed is Magic: Writing Advice from Haruki Murakami  
Also: talent, focus, and endurance.

I'm betting those last three are way more important. And possible.

If you can believe it, Japanese novelist, talking cat enthusiast, and weird ear chronicler Haruki Murakami is over 70 years old.

Not to sound provincial or anything, but... who?

Apparently he does write in genres I read, but I've still never encountered his work.

To celebrate him, and as a gift to those of you who hope to be the kind of writer Murakami is when you are in your 70s, I’ve collected some of his best writing advice below.

I highly doubt I'll make it that far. But I'll read the advice anyway.

“I think the first task for the aspiring novelist is to read tons of novels. Sorry to start with such a commonplace observation, but no training is more crucial. To write a novel, you must first understand at a physical level how one is put together . . . It is especially important to plow through as many novels as you can while you are still young. Everything you can get your hands on—great novels, not-so-great novels, crappy novels, it doesn’t matter (at all!) as long as you keep reading..."

Okay. Check. I read a lot more when I was young than I do now, and what I did read, and continue to read, include badly written books. After all, a negative example is still an example.

“It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.”

Well. We get new words all the time. I'm especially fond of "yeet." But still, context can give words new strength and meaning.

Explain yourself clearly.

I'm often amazed at how many writers think this is bullshit advice. They usually write in the "literary" genre, where obfuscation and incomprehensibility are often mistaken for depth.

Share your dreams.

Look, do you want people to read my stuff, or run away screaming in terror? Stephen King would look at my dreams and go, "goddamn, that's fucked up."

I can only assume he means, here, the other kind of dreams, not the sleeping ones.

“I myself, as I’m writing, don’t know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I start to write a story, I don’t know the conclusion at all and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don’t know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there’s no purpose to writing the story.”

That's... okay, great, that works for him. Just don't put a butler in it, I guess.

Hoard stuff to put in your novel.

Yeah, I think he means ideas here, but I have plenty of physical stuff hoarded, too.

Anyone know what to do with an obsolete computer or five?

“When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation..."

And we're done here.

Okay, not really, but again: four a.m. is sleepy time, not wakey time.

“After focus, the next most important thing for a novelist is, hands down, endurance..."

I'd say this is probably true for any work, not just the creative kind.

Write on the side of the egg.

...you'd have to go to the link to try to make sense of this one. I still can't.

“In every interview I’m asked what’s the most important quality a novelist has to have. It’s pretty obvious: talent. No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist. This is more of a prerequisite than a necessary quality. If you don’t have any fuel, even the best car won’t run.”

Welp, I'm boned.

. . . unless you work really hard!

Yep. Double boned.

Anyway, I thought it was worth sharing, even if you've never heard of this particular writer. I like seeing how others view the work.