Writing Routine Roulette: Haruki Murakami
I’m spending 2023 trying out the routines of different famous authors. In January, I kicked off my year of Writing Routine Roulette with Haruki Murakami.
After reading Murakami’s running/writing memoir, “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running,” I was gripped by inspiration, not only for my writing life but for my life as a runner, too. I started running regularly about ten years ago. It was my first foray into exercise. I chose it because it was cheap, accessible, and, to my mind, glamorous. Oh, to be as swift as the wind, strong and sure-footed, with roses in my cheeks and my hair streaming out behind me! Of course, anyone who’s done any running knows it’s anything but glamorous. Same with writing! So, let’s dive in.
Murakami’s routine goes something like this:
Wake up at dawn.
Write for several hours (4-6)
Run for an hour (or 10k)
Catch up on other work, correspondence, errands, etc.
Eat a healthy diet of fish and veg and go to bed early.
Around the web, I found a few variances on the above, ie. running before writing instead of after. I mostly went with writing first, staying true to the book. Also, thankfully, Murakami himself admits he doesn’t run every day, but six days a week, and when the weather is particularly bad, he swims 2500 metres at an indoor pool instead. On days when the temp dropped below -10, I stayed in and hopped on the rowing machine as a substitute. Here’s how I did.
Day 1
I’m flying. This is going to be so easy. Who knew I could run for a whole hour? Not me. Why haven’t I been doing this the whole time? I’m going to be so fucking fit. Had a million brilliant thoughts about my book, rush home to get them all down.
Distance: 9k
Day 2
Okay, this again. Maybe not as easy as I thought. Who the hell can run for a whole hour? Not me. Why am I doing this? I’m going to be so fucking tired. Had maybe one or two thoughts, namely, my legs hurt and I wish it wasn’t so cold out.
Distance: 7k
Day 5
In his memoir, Murakami compares writing to running a marathon. He would know, he competes in at least one per year. One day, as I’m churning my legs up a hill, the -7c air feeling as thick as butter, it occurs to me that for years, in my writing, I’ve been sprinting through first drafts and patting myself on the back when I type the end, as though I’ve reached the finish line. Inevitably, when I sent these early efforts to readers and received feedback, I got completely stuck and overwhelmed and ended up tucking these manuscripts in drawers and starting something new. Finally, with my most recent draft, I knew I had to suck it up and do the work. It helped that I care much more about this book than I did about the previous ones, but still, when I got feedback—good feedback, from people who know their stuff—I sulked for a month before opening the document again. It felt a lot like putting my running shoes on again after running for an hour six days in a row and only getting a day off, but you know what? As soon as I got going, it wasn’t that hard.
Distance: 8k
Day 6
It’s better not to think about the running and focus instead on what’s happening outside. There is a dog named Hank who lives on my street and barks at me whenever I run by. He tries to chase me but I’m usually going too slow for it to be fun for him. He also chases cars. He has a crooked leg and limps, probably as a result of the aforementioned hobby. But he loves it; whenever I’m driving home and I see him in my rearview mirror, I slow down so he has a chance to catch up.
Distance: 9k
Day 10
Turns out that while I’m not a beginner, I’m naturally more of a mid-distance runner. Murakami, a long-distance runner, explains that the difference is not only physiological but mental as well. It’s more work to drag long limbs across many kilometres; for that reason, long-distance runners tend to be compact as well as wiry. Short-distance sprinters benefit from being well-muscled, which allows for a powerful burst of energy at the top of the race. To run a long distance, you have to be disciplined in reigning in and conserving your energy. If your pace is too fast, you’ll expend all you have before you get to the end. This is a good way to look at writing a novel. It takes an almost supernatural ability to concentrate on anything for such a prolonged amount of time.
Distance: 10k
Day 13
If you are lucky, when you were a kid your mom let you fill a balloon with Jello and drop it from your bedroom window just to see what would happen. The bloody aftermath of this experiment is pretty much how I picture my feet at this point, inside their shoe balloons.
Distance: 4k
Day 17
Turns out running is a good way to meet your neighbours. I hate chit-chat, but when a blue Subaru slows down next to me mid-run on yet another freezing day, I’m grateful for the interruption. Wayne has passed me before but only waved. A retired farmer, he spends most of his day in the car, patrolling the neighbourhood, which in our case is six houses on a street so short, I have to cross the highway and go down another road to hit 10k. He tells me a story about a gopher he brought home as a pet for his kids when they were young. They treated him just like a puppy, playing with him and petting him and feeding him prime rib. The kids liked to pet him so much that the gopher would sometimes run and hide. One day, Wayne found the gopher belly-up in the coat closet, dead. “He died from too much love,” he tells me, winsome. When I get home, I look up what gophers eat. As I suspected, they are strict herbivores. None of this has anything to do with running, but every once in a while someone will ask me where I got the idea for something I wrote and the answer is, it’s always like this. Unexpectedly, from no known quarter, plump with shabby grace.
Distance: 10k
Day 21
The route I take goes down the road I live on, across the highway, and then up another road to a farm where there are horses. It’s downhill for the first half, then uphill, like I’m running the inside of a huge bowl. It occurs to me at some point that this is a good metaphor for the writing process. Drafting is like running downhill. It’s swift, exhilarating, and covers a lot of space in a short period. Editing and revision are, for me, an uphill battle. It’s effortful, a test of will, I have to fight for every bit of forward movement. Getting to the top of the hill is both rewarding and exhausting. At least with writing, I have something to show for it; with running I just have blisters.
Distance: 9k
Day 26
Murakami talks about how running never gets easier. At some point, you’ll be in your prime running years, but even then, it’s a challenging pastime. As you age, it only gets harder. Why would anyone do something that is only going to get more difficult? Word is that, in regards to publishing, writing the book is “the easy part.” Any writer hoping to get published these days is bombarded with bad news about the industry they aspire to; no one reads anymore, book sales are down, publishers are less willing to take a risk on new authors, if you write literary fiction, forget about it!
As if that could stop us. Writing a book at all is a huge leap of faith anyway. When you start, you don’t know if it’s going to be any good. Even if it’s good, it may not get published. Even if it gets published, people might not want to read it. And if they do, they might not like it. So what? When I go running, the only thing I have any control over is whether or not I put my shoes on. I have no idea what’s going to happen when I step out the door. Where am I going with this? Put your shoes on, and write your book. That’s all.
Distance: 4k
Day 28
I have heard about this “runner’s high” but I have yet to feel it. Is it real? I suspect it may have been part of an ad campaign, Nike trying to sell more shoes, and then got absorbed into the canon of common knowledge, but I have no proof.
Distance: 6k
Day 31
I can’t say that my running got better, but one month is fairly short in terms of training. For his annual marathons, Murakami will train for months beforehand, regulating his speed, distance, diet, and lifestyle carefully to reach peak performance. I may run a marathon one day. As far as writing goes, I did get about 30k words into a new draft. More than that, it took a lot of grit to go out and run some mornings when it was below zero, and the experience shored up my resolve to tackle revisions in a deliberate way, instead of just staring at the document and hoping they would happen. Sometimes, crossing the finish line is as simple as doing the hard thing, over and over again, until you get there.