The more I am reading Haruki Murakami, the more I am falling in love with this man. There are more reasons to this than one. I love the way he narrates the events. I am reading “What I Talk about When I Talk about Running” now. I find this to be a unique book in the sense that at more levels than one, this book is not just about running and how one can run long distances. This book can also be read as a guideline for aspiring novelists. He draws certain parallels between a runner and a writer and goes on to show that both share some common features and qualities that are an inevitable part of what makes them what they are.
Murakami opines that the most important quality a novelist has to have is “talent”. He goes on to add that no matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent, you can forget about being a novelist. Having talent, as he sees it, is more of a prerequisite than a necessary quality. If you do not have any fuel, even the best car won’t run. Then he points out a problem with talent, which is that, in most cases, the person involved cannot control its amount or quality. One might find the amount isn’t enough and want to increase it, or try to be frugal to make it last longer, but in neither case do things work out that easily. Talent, he says, has a mind of its own and wells up when it wants to, and once it dries up, that’s it. Of course, there are anomalies to this in certain poets and rock singers whose genius went out in a blaze of glory – people like Schubert and Mozart, whose dramatic early deaths turned them into legends – have a certain appeal, but for the vast majority of us, this is not the model we follow.
The second most important quality, as he sees it, is “focus” – the ability to concentrate all your limited talents on whatever is critical at the moment. Without that, you cannot accomplish anything of value, while if you can focus effectively, you will be able to compensate for an erratic talent or even a shortage of it. Even a novelist who has a lot of talent and a mind full of great new ideas probably can’t write a thing if, for instance, he’s suffering a lot of pain from a cavity. The pain blocks concentration, and that thwarts you from writing.
The next most important thing for a novelist is, hands down, “endurance”. If you concentrate on writing three or four hours a day and feel tired after a week of this, you are not going to be able to write a long work, and this is where endurance comes into play. What’s needed for a writer of fiction – at least one who hopes to write a novel – is the energy to focus every day for half a year, a year, or two years. We can compare it to breathing. If concentration is the process of just holding your breath, endurance is the art of slowly, quietly breathing at the same time you are storing air in your lungs. Unless you can find a balance between both, it will be difficult to write novels professionally over a long time. Continuing to breathe while you hold your breath.
Zulfiqar Parvez is Head of English at Tanzimul Ummah International Tahfiz School.
