Chapter 85: Thanks, but…

There comes a point in the lives of famous writers when they feel the time has come to turn to their readers and say, “I know you’ve all been eager to know how I became the famous writer I am today, and so now I will share my story with you, and perhaps one day, if you too are lucky and talented and things fall in place just so, you too can be a famous writer.”

Some do this very well, with a combination of self-effacement and sage advice drawn from hard lessons learned along the way. They may, at turns, praise friends and loved ones, and recall every negative review they’ve ever gotten. A few, like the late John Gardner, whom I cited last week, taught writing and put between covers what they’ve learned and preached, in Gardner’s case, to great effect.

And then there are the ones where you are left wondering whose idea this book was. As it happens I recently came across a review in The New York Times of “Novelist as a Vocation,” by Haruki Murakami. I am a big Murakami fan, and not only because I lived in Japan for five years. I thought “The Windup Bird  Chronicle” was a great book and have enjoyed most if not all of his work. So I was eager to hear what Murakami had to say about his craft, only to quickly discover that the reviewer, Charles Finch, was less than pleased.

He wrote: “The first lesson he wants to impart is that writing is easy. ‘To tell the truth, I have never found writing painful,’ he says. ‘What’s the point of writing, anyway, if you’re not enjoying it? I can’t get my head around the idea of ‘the suffering writer.’ Basically, I think, novels should emerge in a spontaneous flow.’”

Finch is outraged. “What is a young writer to make of this? Murakami presses the idea again and again, and it no doubt explains his productivity and fluency, yet the fact remains that for nearly every writer other than him, the work is frequently awful, ‘a long, sunken fatigue,’ in Proust’s words, a ‘bout with some painful illness’”…

You take the point. He is suggesting that Murakami is in essence leading aspiring writers down a primrose path of believing that what awaits them is joy and “spontaneous flow.” As someone who writes a newsletter whose mission is to find joy in this often painful work, I was of two minds. Actually three: Yes, writing should not be painful. But alas, it often is. Still, if it can be less painful the benefit redounds to the writer and ultimately to the reader.

Was Murakami preaching an approach that much different than mine? Was he, in fact, preaching a cockeyed but useful wisdom? 

How and more importantly why people choose to write for a living are questions eternally asked but never really answered. (I say “for a living,” not to measure success financially but to differentiate people who write from time to time from those for whom writing defines who and what they are: serious writers don’t have to make money; they just have to keep writing). 

At some point, someone decides that they need to write and then, by hook or crook sets about doing it as often as they can. Perhaps to order the universe. Perhaps to see their thoughts come alive on the page. They just do it. They accept the Faustian bargain: the highest powers have granted you the talent, discipline and skills to bring stories to life through words. 

In exchange for this gift you will labor and struggle, fail and fret. Writing: a life where fun, as it is said of the University of Chicago, goes to die.

Murakami did not set out to make his living writing novels. He was by his own admission an indifferent college student who studied drama and film - never a writing or literature class. (College is typically a chance for Japanese students who worked like mad to get there to have a few years of doing a whole lot of nothing)  With not even a stab at writing prose, one day, seemingly out of nowhere, he just started writing and damn if that first novel didn't win a literary prize. He was on his way. Presto. Already you are not loving this guy.  

Murakami goes on to do a lot of ruminating about the writing life, and to be frank, a lot of it is baloney. 

Like: writers cannot be friends with other writers (he is specific here about novelists but my novelists friends are friends with other novelists, so like, huh?) For what it’s worth, many of my friends are writers and always will be.

Or: anyone can be a novelist – no training or experience required. I do not know what universe Murakami dwells in but where I live and work talent alone and a terrific idea will not carry the day; there are skills necessary to bring that idea to life and those skills are almost always acquired over time, and failure, and trying again. When Truman Capote was asked how he could write a celebrated first novel, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” at age 22 he replied that he was not, strictly speaking, a young writer because he had already written a million words. Many, presumably, not the right ones.

But then, having suggested that this writing business isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be – like chill, dude, just get a pen and paper and do it – Murakami suggests that maybe the work is not the seemingly easy joy he hints at. He compares novelists with people who spend inordinate amounts of time building miniature boats inside of bottles. It is an interesting way to think about the work, and he returns to that image of the writer bent over the page, reworking and reworking until he gets the words just right. It is, he allows, “a very uncool enterprise.”

So what are you, the struggling (as we all do, every day) writer, to make of this? I cannot go as far as Charles Finch and suggest that writing is a joyless endeavor, because I discovered far too far long in my writing life that it need not be. But I am with him in his visceral reaction when encountering a writer of great international renown suggesting that the work can appear on the page out of nowhere, as it did for him. Spontaneity may get your rolling but it will not carry you home.

Yet while I cannot speak for Haruki Murakami, I am not without a certain sympathy for his argument, maddeningly presented as it is. The writing life is not easy. It never is, and never will be. But it can be a joy. The catch: it is only joy when it’s hard. The challenge, the struggle, the battle. Hard meaning in the doing, not in having written. 

I recall years ago in Korea being asked whether I, as an American, could experience happiness and sadness at the same time.

No, I replied, incredulous as the suggestion.

We can, he said.

And that, in a nutshell, is the writing life. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry and prose. Happiness and sadness at the same time.

Which I like to think can combine to create joy.

* * *

We’ll be off next week for Thanksgiving. Wishing you and yours and happy holiday. And for the writers among you, a suggestion: give yourselves a few days off. You’ve earned it. 

And if you’re looking for a good read over the holiday weekend, we invite you to check out our latest story at The Delacorte Review A Cold Case in Florida, The Mysterious Murder of a Troubled Teen by Jeff Patterson.