Haruki Murakami On How to Improve as a Writer

[@WriteConscious]

🚀 Want to WRITE better? Join my free writing school: www.skool.com/writeconscious 📚 Book club, daily podcasts, and my writing: writeconscious.substack.com 📖 Read my guide to Haruki Murakami here (free): writeconscious.ck.page/30d93ddf11 Insta: instagram.com/writeconscious 🤔My Favorite Haruki Murakami novel amzn.to/4eyPr14 📕My Best Books of All-Time List: writeconscious.ck.page/355619345e 🔥Want to READ my wife’s fire poetry? Go here: marigoldeclipse.substack.co

[@mlrumph]

Thanks! Such an inspiration!!

[@misfitmaniac3084]

More DFW!!

[@markcastro955]

Great advice. Thanks, Ian.

[@FrancisGo.]

I love how Murakami regards Mishima as a manifestation of the curse of being Japanese. Both writers are great. So the curse is a blessing, like the mark on the brow of the protagonist of 'The Wind Up Bird Chronicle'. Jujutsu Kaisen style.

[@Xaglacionn]

Techniques are kind of a weird thing. I feel like if you have to consciously use a particular technique, you're not good enough to pull it off intuitively and it will stick out like a sore thumb and be ineffective. But you also have to use them consciously at first in order to practice. Concrete goals are vital though. When you climb in the sparring ring, you need to know what you're going to be focusing on that day. Offense, defense, footwork, timing, distance, a particular punch pulled off under pressure? Whatever it is you gotta know. You just gotta know what your sparring ring is for your art. I think short stories are a good place for it. Revision of a novel as well. For improving in general, mastering the sentence is a good concrete goal for new writers. Move on to the paragraph after that. If you can do that you can master scenes and chapters.

[@harrishadi4556]

Clicked ASAP

[@andergrindstudios7546]

love the work..

[@zacnewford]

20k incoming! Nice

[@padmeasmr]

i think writing as a relationship between the writer and words. There can be different levels of affinity which is innate. And its usually deeper with your mothertongue. Without any affinity, trying to improve writing skills with any method is useless. Then theres storytelling and all the rest but I feel like its a bit different topic than writing itself.

[@angelagilmartin2109]

I am using the Reedsy Weekly Writing Contest to practice getting my writing DONE to a level within a week AND to get precious feedback. But the work once submitted is no longer “mine” to a limited extent…would appreciate your thoughts on this…I guess this is why you’re building a true, supportive community, Ian👍🏼

[@andergrindstudios7546]

my screenplay names: Johnny Bullet, Kleebell Jackson, Julius Caesar Jackson III, Honey Delacroix.. ; )

[@andergrindstudios7546]

evil genius: Michele LaFontaine (flamboyantly gay man)

[@twmorris89]

Man, can we get a few more of these micro-apprenticeship type videos?

[@andergrindstudios7546]

Ian - love the work.. have you picked up Astronauts/Tsingtao Blues again? given it another read? you'd said you saved it.. let me know bro..

[@jeffrey3498]

You can definitely learn how to write, but how do you teach someone to create startling metaphors and similes?

[@notaprob4rob970]

I’m by no means a pro, but I think you can work on metaphors and similes the way a comedian might work on a punch line. Experiment with the image and the phrasing until it cuts the way you want it to. I’d start with the “rule of cool” at first, aim for pop and comprehension. And later, once you got the rhythm down, work with more intention. That’s the most important part. Without an aim, the sharpest tool is pointless. And when your words are sharp with purpose, that’s how you get to the gut. On the other hand, you can look outside and wonder how the hell we arrived at metaphors and similes and why we like them so much. They are ways of giving images meaning by stating what they demonstrate. Sharping blades and slicing guts, what the hell does that mean? That doesn’t mean anything, you might as well kick rocks, and yet, they can make a point by demonstrating something. There’s more to it, I’m sure, but I hope that helps. That’s what I think about, and that’s what I tell myself: in every act a demonstration. Even this comment, and every error within it, shows how man would like to help and often fails at it.

[@jeffrey3498]

@@notaprob4rob970 Nice reply! Thank you so much! Maybe you're correct about being able to teach someone how to become creatively brilliant; I'm not so sure though. I think of some of the sentences that William Faulkner or John Updike wrote. Even David Foster Wallace. How do you teach someone to be brilliant? I also think about music, songs. Paul Simon, for example, was just a kid when he wrote the Sound Of Silence. Paul was asked how he wrote such a mature song while being so young. Simon said he had no idea where it came from. Paul didn't say this: but maybe it was simply genius? Bob Dylan in an interview looked back at his earlier songs and said he could never write songs like that now. Simon and Dylan surely couldn't teach someone how to create great stuff like they created. I guess my point is, and I'm not saying I'm correct, is that I suppose you can teach someone how to basically write, and to grind-out through the intellect a sort of pseudo brilliance, but I doubt if even a John Gardner could teach creative brilliance.

[@notaprob4rob970]

@@jeffrey3498 You’re welcome! I think there’s a lot of truth here, and I am mostly in agreement, but the fact remains: no matter the case, brilliant or not, they were writing. And perhaps more importantly, they were thinking about writing. There’s something strange about this kind of attentiveness that is the key to what we might call “breakthroughs,” those elusive upticks of genius you mentioned. The first thing to remember is that writing is unnatural. Letters are unnatural. These are things we learn and make familiar to ourselves. The difference between writers and people that can write is how familiar they are, how close they are to the written language. That’s why practice is so important, you have to make writing natural and maintain this new kind of intuition. You think about writing until you think in writing. And that’s only the first part. The second part (and I’m keeping it to two parts for simplicity’s sake) actually has nothing to do with writing and everything to do with thinking. We stop by new windows of clarity constantly, those moments when life starts to make sense or when old things have a new meaning, a new depth to them. We all experience something like this, but only the writer is ready to capture it in writing. There’s a lot to say about why people have these moments and why some people seem to have them more. But that’s another conversation, albeit an important one. What’s more important is this: don’t hope for good sentences, prepare for them, seek them out. Readiness is faster than hope.

[@jeffrey3498]

@@notaprob4rob970 Beautifully said, all of it. Rings so true. And thank you! I suppose I digress, but here's what I mean when I talk about writing. DFW from Pale King: "Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers." "Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not a murder, on the wing, silent with intent, corn-bound for the pasture's wire beyond which one horse smells at the other's behind, the lead horse's tail obligingly lifted. Your shoes' brand incised in the dew. An alfalfa breeze. Socks' burrs. Dry scratching inside a culvert. Rusted wire and tilted posts more a symbol of restraint than a fence per se. NO HUNTING. The shush of the interstate off past the windbreak. The pasture's crows standing at angles, turning up patties to get at the worms underneath, the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail. Read these."

[@notaprob4rob970]

@@jeffrey3498 I’ve yet to read Pale King, but now I just might! Thank you, that was lovely. I see what you mean, this is the kind of writing that sounds impossible. My little cheat is this: read this three times before you write, once out loud, once beneath your breath, and once in your head. I do this often with poetry before I write anything and it helps tremendously. Won’t make you DFW but it’ll help channel that spirit and cadence.

[@davidwalker9594]

I've spent a lot of time analyzing the greats, between writing, visual art, to comedy.. and I've come to the conclusion that all of these things can be taught. Yet, for some reason the most acceptable head canon is that none of it can be learned. Almost every single person who says this don't professionally do the thing they've criticized so boldly.

[@fireball43]

It can’t be taught, but it can be learned.

[@redacted5035]

*WRITE MOAR!!!!!!* 🫵😤

[@Jonnynot1plate]

Could you point to where you studied verbs for images?

[@sockthief9138]

I have all those specific editions in the thumbnail so I clicked.

[@kentjensen4504]

He said Literary Crusade. I was hoping for that. Anyone remember who in chat suggested that?

[@phoenixproductions2846]

I'm not trying to sound pretentious but I just found this channel and from the outside I'm trying to understand why this channel seems so obsessed with this murakami guy. What exactly makes him so worth reading into that justifies this channel centering around him so heavily.

[@Emerardo]

He make book good :]]]] He make good words :]]]]]

[@AnonymousAnonposter]

0:54 okay then, talk about Italo Calvino.

[@FrancisGo.]

My feeling on God is that The Logos disregards most of what we think as chatter, confabulation, and conjecture. To sin is to miss the mark, but most people don't have a clear aim. Only when the Holy Spirit reveals itself to you are you capable of missing the mark. Suddenly, you've got a spellchecker that knows every mistake you could ever make before you've made it, but it gives you the freedom to do it without automatically correcting you. 😂🎉❤

[@andergrindstudios7546]

Murakami sometimes gets lost, no?

[@hello50881]

I believe he is human, yes

[@NoPrivateProperty]

Hitchens said to write like you talk. right? if you have something interesting to say, you should be alright.

[@dannydreadnought-xk4qx]

But how good a writer was Hitchens in your opinion? I've read far more compelling writers with ornate and stylised prose.

[@NoPrivateProperty]

@@dannydreadnought-xk4qx do you value style or substance? was Tolstoy stylish?

[@williambartholmey5946]

@@NoPrivateProperty Both would be ideal, but if forced to choose I'll take a master stylist every time.

[@Kayakingoff]

People pay me for my writing, so I must be talented? According to Stephen King!