Murakami's book on running suggests that writing a novel is manual labor. It is just laborious work. He says that three things are required: talent, focus, and endurance. Talent is necessary but not sufficient. There has to be a way of grinding it out over the long haul.
This makes perfect sense. The book itself, What I talk about when I talk about running, could be seen as a slight book, a mixture of travelogues and diaries. If you like Murakami and running, though, it is worth a look. The authorial persona is humble and realistic. Failures and successes are both treated lightly.
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"Writing novels, to me, is basically a kind of manual labor. Writing itself is mental labor, but finishing an entire book is closer to manual labor. It doesn’t involve heavy lifting, running fast, or leaping high. Most people, though, only see the surface reality of writing and think of writers as involved in quiet, intellectual work done in their study. If you have the strength to lift a coffee cup, they figure, you can write a novel. But once you try your hand at it, you soon find that it isn’t as peaceful a job as it seems. The whole process—sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the whole flow of the story on track—requires far more energy, over a long period, than most people ever imagine. You might not move your body around, but there’s grueling, dynamic labor going on inside you. Everybody uses their mind when they think. But a writer puts on an outfit called narrative and thinks with his entire being; and for the novelist that process requires putting into play all your physical reserve, often to the point of overexertion."
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Vintage International) (pp. 79-80). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
4 comments:
Great point. My son pointed me to a Q&A with David Foster Wallace (42:55) where he emphasizes the sheer laboriousness of the writing/editing process to a young writer.
It reminded me of our shared suspicions about "shitty first drafts". My hunch is that the word processor has really changed the "labor" of writing. But that old need to write and rewrite and type and retype was an important part of the creative process.
So one of the reasons that you and I suggest doing a less-than-shitty job the first time around is that we know that the "work" really will feel "done" for many writers once the words are on the page.
This is something Wallace seems to be getting at too.
Other arts are similar. The amount of time you have to put in doing things like preparing canvases, getting dyes, etc., for instance. Also I knew a sculptor who had a project that required him to drill small holes in a whole lot of ping-pong balls. I mean a lot. It took a long time and was boring.
The work of doing footnotes and stuff. Formatting.
Then, things that are labor saving and efficient really go against the work ethic of the long distance writer. Suppose the sculptor hired another person to drill the holes.
Gosh, I wonder now what things we shouldn't have, where to draw the line. I'm glad the sculptor drilled the holes himself, but ... should we give up JSTOR?
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