Deciphering Culture

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If you’ve passed by Deciphering Culture with any regularity, you’ve probably noticed that I’m a serious fan of Haruki Murakami. The blog 99% posted a short piece on Murakami’s thoughts on the essential traits needed for successful as a novelist (excerpted from Muraakami’s memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running). The insights Murakami learned from running are applicable to all creative endeavors: you need talent, focus and endurance. An excerpt from the excerpt posted on 99% (Haruki-Murakami-Talent-Is-Nothing-Without-Focus-and-Endurance?).

…what’s the most important quality a novelist has to have. It’s pretty obvious: talent. Now 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.

The problem with talent, though, is that in most cases the person involved can’t control its amount or quality. You might find the amount isn’t enough and you want to increase it, or you might try to be frugal and make it last longer, but in neither case do things work out that easily. Talent has a mind of its own and wells up when it wants to, and once it dries up, that’s it….

…the next most important quality is for a novelist, that’s easy too: focus—the ability to concentrate all your limited talents on whatever’s critical at the moment. Without that you can’t accomplish anything of value, while, if you can focus effectively, you’ll be able to compensate for an erratic talent or even a shortage of it….

After focus, the next most important thing for a novelist is, hands down, endurance. If you concentrate on writing three or four hours a day and feel tired after a week of this, you’re not going to be able to write a long work. What’s needed of the writer of fiction—at least one who hopes to write a novel—is the energy to focus every day for half a year, or a year, or two years….

Fortunately, these two disciplines—focus and endurance—are different from talent, since they can be acquired and sharpened through training. You’ll naturally learn both concentration and endurance when you sit down every day at your desk and train yourself to focus on one point. This is a lot like the training of muscles I wrote of a moment ago. You have to continually transmit the object of your focus to your entire body, and make sure it thoroughly assimilates the information necessary for you to write every single day and concentrate on the work at hand. And gradually you’ll expand the limits of what you’re able to do. Almost imperceptibly you’ll make the bar rise. This involves the same process as jogging every day to strengthen your muscles and develop a runner’s physique. Add a stimulus and keep it up. And repeat. Patience is a must in this process, but I guarantee results will come.

Related articles

• Ethnographic Storytelling – another lesson from Haruki Murakami (decipheringculture.com)
• Ethnographic Fiction – a lesson from Haruki Murakami (decipheringculture.com)
• Edinburgh Festival 2011: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, King’s Theatre, review (telegraph.co.uk)
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – review (guardian.co.uk)