Writing like Haruki Murakami
How the revision process of a writer will (hopefully) help me with my own
“What’s the next book?”
This is the new question that is evolving as I continue to do readings for the book. What is the next book, the next project. It’s not a bad question but one I wish would come later.
The next project (unless something happens) is going to be in prose. That means I’m going to have to figure out a new writing schedule and process, which at the moment is me jotting down ideas and writing in my newsletters.
I am such a fan of the YouTube writers who try the writing schedules of famous writers. It’s a new thing I’m discovering about myself. I’ll watch someone else wake up at 4 a.m. to write but me? No, I will still be snoring comfortably in my warm bed.
But needs must and I must get the work done. So, I decided, quite quasi-randomly to investigate the writing practice of Haruki Murakami.
I discovered Murakami when I was an adjunct professor at Houston Community College. One of the perks of being a professor is being to able to check out books for a longer period of time than everyone else. We get about three weeks with the book. Trust me, we need that time!
I had just returned to Houston (2015) and was in need of a good story, the kind that just makes you feel like things can be okay. The librarian at the campus recommended the Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage and my world was rocked. I’ve been a fan of Murakami ever since. I even teach one of his short stories in my class.
I’ve also been a fan of the writers who tried his daily writing process. Christy Anne Jones is one of my favorite ones. That’s the video above. It’s a good watch.
While I give them props for waking up at 4 a.m. and running 10 kilometers, that’s not me. I can barely get up at 5:30 a.m. to get to work on time. However, a revision process could be more helpful especially where I am in my writing journey. So when I read about his revision process, I was in! The process was detailed in his essay collection on writing, Novelist as a Vocation but also in an excerpt on his publisher’s website.
The process for revision is pretty extensive and contains several levels of back and forth before his editor is even allowed to see it. It’s very much the carpenter way of writing — creating, stand back, adjust, etc. This has totally worked for me in the past but somehow I got away from it.
So I decided to try his process with the new project I’m working on. I’ll take Christy Anne’s direction and give it a name — Project Runaway. I’ll talk about the reasons for the name below.
Murakami’s essay collection on writing has taken me a bit to read but it’s a good read, indeed.
The Murakami Revision Process
According to his essay, the process is contingent to this idea — focus on one thing at a time. That one thing is singular: one chapter, one story, one genre. That means any additional things you need to do or write you’ll need to put it to the side and tackle it when it’s break time (break from the project) or do it before you start.
This is going to be the challenging part, I fear.
Another item that needs to be contingent is cleaning the space. He means this both physically and in your life. Take things off your plate and delegate. Physically make sure that your space is clear of clutter and distractions. This aids in the focus and novels (writing projects) need focus, he said.
The goal is to write 10 pages a day. However, he’s playing kind of fast and loose with handwritten pages vs typed. This is from the essay:
When writing a novel, my rule is to produce roughly ten Japanese manuscript pages (the equivalent of sixteen hundred English words) every day. This works out to about two and a half pages on my computer, but I base my calculations on the old system out of habit.
For this experiment, I am going to go with the 2–3 pages since I am working in a shorter medium than the novel. It also seemed more doable with my schedule.
He also says of these pages that this is a clock in/clock out situtation. Write your pages and be done. Don’t write less but also don’t write more. We’re creating what he has called in the past “a trance” and that requires discipline.
Now, here’s the process:
1.) Write the whole darn thing. Whatever it is, write it all. Dump it on to the page. Write it “cool and detached” and “without hope or despair”.
2.) Let it sit for a week. This is one of several breaks. After that, re-write the thing. Make “sweeping changes, leave nothing untouched.” At this point be brutal. Cut. Rewrite. Add. Subtract. Restructure. If the project is a novel, this is going to take a month or two. For my project, and since I am trying this out in a shorter medium, I didn’t put a time limit to this knowing there are TONS of breaks in this process.
3.) Let it sit for another week. This is the next break. Rewrite or revise it again. For this one focus on the details of the work — fine tune passages, adjust tone, fix plot holes, smooth out “hard to read sections”, look at story flow. At this point there should be “no major surgery, just nip and tuck.”
4.) Guess what’s next? Yes, another break. A week, still. When you come back from the week, you’re “tightening the screws here, loosening a screw there.” What does this mean? Balance. Still don’t know what that means? Me either, but I feel like this is something that will be more obvious once we get this deep into the process. Off the cuff, I would assume that this could be about pacing and diction since the revision before was more on the macro-level of things.
5.) We start this fifth step with a TWO week break. This is a longer break for sure. At this point he says to allow the work to “settle”. Go do other things.
6.) Here comes the next revision but this time it’s more of an overall read from front to back. This is where beta readers come in. For him, it’s his wife (cute). He says some interesting things here — he goes back and forth with the beta reader and if there is something they hit on, even if you disagree, re-write that section anyway. He says here that no matter what you have written, it can always be written better. At this stage of the process, he says to spend as much time as needed/possible fixing everything.
A note about beta readers here. Murakami says that they are the “fixed points” and the “North stars”. They not only need to be frank but they need to be trustworthy.
At this point, once all this is done, he sends the project to his editor. Wow!
First week
I can report that the first week of doing this was AMAZING! I focused on 2–3 page limit every day. The idea is creating, right? The revision and the editing make the story what it is but the creating, that needs to happen. And in the first week, I created several pages of a new story, one that is kicking my hind quarters left right and sideways.
This is the discovery phase. I know the premise of Project Runaway. The section on working on is really just … I don’t know … started out with promise but then it became like the fly trapped in a spider’s web.
Me. I am that fly.
But here’s the big lesson I learned from the first week. You don’t have to know all the answers right now. If the creation phrase, this first couple of weeks of writing the thing, is about putting the story or the ideas on paper, then it needs to be the messiest thing ever. It needs to be so messy only I understand it.
And in that, there is a release, so I am releasing.
Then something interesting happened … the story begged for different decisions. I realized that I picked the wrong narrator and so I used another character in the story as a narrator. The story opened up. Soon, I was off to the races and a narrative arc began to form in my head! The story is not complete yet so I’m still crafting.
So, for Week 1 of the Murakami writing process I am going to call it a win!
Let’s see if I can keep up this momentum. Any bets?
Upcoming
Project Runaway is going to take some time but I’m definitely up for the challenge. Here’s the goal — I am going to document using the Murakami. process as I write this part of my new project. Let’s see if this will work.
I’ll try to keep this up as I not only continue to promote and do reading for the book but also keep a teaching (and grading) schedule and some caregiver duties.
This could be either the best idea ever or it could go up in flames!
