From time to time I’ll recommend—not review, mind you, but recommend, and yes, there is a difference—books I think authors should have on their shelves. Some may be new and still in print, some may be difficult to find, but all will be, at least in my humble opinion, essential texts for any author, so worth looking for.
Over the course of this month I slowly worked my way through the short book Novelist as a Vocation, by one of my favorite authors of all time, Haruki Murakami, as the first of what I hope will be monthly group reads at the Fantasy Author’s Handbook GoodReads group. My first experience with Murakami’s work was The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a novel that affected me deeply, and though some may argue its place in the genre I fixed as one of my favorite fantasy novels of all time way back in 2009. I really should update that post, but The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle will stay on that list.
With the understanding that I am reading his work in translation—a subject Murakami gets into in Novelist as a Vocation—I find his work enormously inspirational as a writer, and deeply strange, mesmerizing, and often immensely unsettling as a reader. That being the case, when I saw this book announced I pre-ordered it from Amazon as a must read, though why it’s taken me this long to actually read it, well… Anyway, maybe it was waiting for the GoodReads group! In any case, let’s talk about…
Novelist as a Vocation is a collection of essays Murakami wrote for a magazine in Japan starting in 2010. The book was first published in Japanese in 2015, but took till 2022 to find its way to an English translation and publication by Knopf. There are eleven essays in all, and I found each and every one valuable and interesting, but in surprising ways. Here are some snippets I found interesting in each of the essays…
From the essay: “Are Novelists Broad-minded?”
Writing novels is, to my way of thinking, basically a very uncool enterprise. I see hardly anything chic or stylish about it. Novelists sit cloistered in their rooms, intently fiddling with words, batting around one possibility after another. They may scratch their heads an entire day to improve the quality of a single line by a tiny bit. No one applauds, or says “Well done,” or pats them on the back. Sitting there alone, they look over what they’ve accomplished and quietly nod to themselves. It may be that later, when the novel comes out, not a single reader will notice the improvement they made that day. That is what novel writing is really all about. It is time-consuming, tedious work.
From the essay: “When I Became a Novelist”
It is the right of all writers to experiment with the possibilities of language and expand the range of its effectiveness. Without that adventurous spirit, nothing new can ever be born.
From the essay: “On Literary Prizes”
At the risk of stating the obvious, it is literary works that last, not literary prizes. I doubt many can tell you who won the Akutagawa Prize two years ago, or the Nobel Prize winner three years back. Can you? Truly great works that have stood the test of time, on the other hand, are lodged in our memory forever. Was Ernest Hemingway a Nobel Prize winner? (He was.) How about Jorge Luis Borges? (Was he? Who gives a damn?) A literary prize can turn the spotlight on a particular work, but it can’t breathe life into it. It’s that simple.
I’ll refer you to a previous post for lots more on the essay “On Originality.”
From the essay: “So What Should I Write About?”
We are—or at least I am—equipped with this expansive mental chest of drawers. Each drawer is packed with memories, or information. There are big drawers and small ones. A few have secret compartments, where information can be hidden. When I am writing, I can open them, extract the material I need, and add it to my story. Their numbers are countless, but when I am focused on my writing I know without thinking exactly which drawer holds what and can immediately put my hands on what I am looking for. Memories I could never recall otherwise come naturally to me. It’s a great feeling to enter into this elastic, unrestrained state, as if my imagination had pulled free from my thinking mind to function as an autonomous, independent entity. Needless to say, for a novelist like me the information stored in my chest is a rich and irreplaceable resource.
From the essay: “Making Time Your Ally: On Writing a Novel”
This may make some people angry, but although literary editors in Japan are specialists, in the end they are company employees who can be reassigned at any time. Of course there are exceptions, but by and large they are appointed by upper management to “look after” you, which means there is no telling how long the relationship may last.
From the essay: “A Completely Personal and Physical Occupation”
Novelists basically tell stories. And telling stories, to put it another way, means delving deep down into your unconscious. To descend to the darkest realms of the mind. The broader the scale of the story, the deeper the novelist has to descend. It’s like constructing a large building, where you need to dig down very deep for the foundation. And the more hidden the story you’re telling, the heavier and thicker is that subterranean darkness.
From the essay: “Regarding Schools”
The reason I didn’t study hard was simple. It was boring. I just wasn’t interested.
From the essay: “What Kind of Characters Should I Include?”
I’m often asked if any characters in my novels are based on real people. On the whole, the answer is no, though sometimes it’s yes.
From the essay: “Who Do I Write For?”
Interviewers sometimes ask me, “What sort of readers do you have in mind when you write your novels?” And I’m always sort of stuck for an answer. The reason being that I’ve never had the sense that I’m writing for someone else. And I don’t particularly have that feeling even now.
From the essay: “Going Abroad: A New Frontier”
As far as I can see, in any country people who go into the publishing field or want to become editors basically love books. Even in America, if someone wants to earn a lot and have a huge expense account, they don’t go into publishing.
I’ll admit I went into this book expecting some degree of “how to,” for advice on becoming a novelist and maintaining a career as a novelist. Instead, Novelist as a Vocation is in the same vein as Stephen King’s On Writing, in that it offers little if any hands on advice—Murakami even less than King—but is instead something maybe more interesting, and that’s a memoir of one author’s journey through writing and publishing. In the same way that you’d have to time travel back some fifty years in time to in any way emulate Stephen King’s journey into and through the life of a working novelist, you’d have to time travel about the same period of time and be born and raised in Japan to emulate Murakami’s.
This is another example of how any glimpse into the creative mind of a noted working author is of great value to anyone working to do the same, but authors can really only tell us what they did, what they learned, and what worked or didn’t work for them. At risk of sounding like I’m plugging myself, advice from an editor, who has worked with lots of authors at various stages in their careers, might help you see a wider view of the art and craft of storytelling and the simultaneously over regimented and wildly chaotic publishing business.
Still, read this book!
—Philip Athans
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