The Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert had this to say: “To reach the source, you have to swim against the current. Only trash swims downstream.” Lines like these can really buck up your spirits!
Haruki Murakami’s NOVELIST AS A VOCATION is a series of essays on the art and work of novel-writing, with fairly broad application to most forms of writing. Sometimes he’ll go hard in on the novelistic form itself, sometimes he will widen out to the general experiences of a writer. It seems to me that you don’t require specific knowledge of his own work – my own reading of him is somewhat patchy – to get along with this amiable work. For instance, on being permanently consigned to the hole of the bad review in his own country:
In those days, if I had leapt into a pond to save an old woman from drowning, the critics—and I mean this only half-jokingly—would have found something to carp about. “A mere publicity stunt,” they would have scoffed. “Surely she could have swum to shore.”
I always, always tell people to avoid reading reviews, precisely because this is how they get into your head.
Something I found interesting was the tale of how he found his style:
…as an experiment, I decided to write the opening of my novel in English. What the hell, I figured. If I was going to do something unorthodox, why not go all the way?
Needless to say, my ability in English composition didn’t amount to much. My vocabulary was severely limited, as was my command of English syntax. I could only write in short, simple sentences. Which meant that, however complex and numerous the thoughts running around in my head, I couldn’t even attempt to set them down as they came to me. The language had to be simple, my ideas expressed in an easy-to-understand way, the descriptions stripped of all extraneous fat, the form made compact, and everything arranged to fit a container of limited size. The result was a rough, uncultivated kind of prose. As I struggled to express myself in that fashion, however, a distinctive rhythm began to take shape.
It also led me to the realization that I could express my thoughts and feelings with a limited set of words and grammatical structures, as long as I combined them effectively and linked them together in a skillful manner.
What I was seeking by writing first in English and then “translating” into Japanese was no less than the creation of an unadorned “neutral” style that would allow me freer movement.
Writing in my new style felt more like performing music than composing literature, a feeling that stays with me today.
This is, in essence, how Beckett found his style: writing in French and translating back to English, to escape the supernatural weight of Joyce’s shadow.
Also, like Stephen King, he’s not a notebook keeper, and trusts to his memory to retain those ideas that are truly good and important. I remind you: you and I are neither Stephen King nor Haruki Murakami, so keep your notebook. The piece herein on how he arranges something of a mind palace – but it actually looks more to him like the filing cabinets in Soderbergh’s Kafka film – is a lot of fun, too.
Good book for writers and creatively-minded people of all kinds, from an author who thinks deeply and clearly about art and work.
NOVELIST AS A VOCATION, Haruki Murakami (shop)
