Novelist as a Vocation(25)

Now, when I look around me, I can’t be sure whether I’ve been proven right or not. How can I possibly tell? I doubt that literary value can ever be fully gauged, however much time passes. Nevertheless, my belief that I am basically headed in the right direction has remained unshaken since 1979, when I published my first novel. In another three or four decades, conditions will have changed yet again and the situation will be clearer, but given my age, I may not be around to see for myself. I hope one of you can keep an eye on things for me.



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In the end, I think each new generation has its own fixed amount of material that it can use to write novels, and that the shape and relative weight of that material retroactively determine the shape and function of the vehicle that must be designed to carry it. It is from the correlation of material and vehicle—from their interface, as it were—that new forms of novelistic reality emerge.

Every era, every generation, experiences its own “reality.” The novelist’s job of painstakingly collecting and stockpiling that material is as crucial as ever, and will remain so in the future.

So if your aim is to write fiction, take a close look around you. The world may appear a mundane place, but in fact it is filled with a variety of enigmatic and mysterious ores. Novelists are people who happen to have the knack of discovering and refining that raw material. Even more wonderful: the process costs virtually nothing. If you are blessed with a pair of good eyes, you too can mine the ore you choose to your heart’s content!

Can you think of a more wonderful way to make a living?





Making Time Your Ally: On Writing a Novel





In my many years as a professional writer, I have written works of varying sizes in a wide variety of literary forms. Extremely long novels (1Q84, for example), slim novels (like After Dark), short stories, even shorter “palm of the hand” stories, and so on. If I were to compare these to naval vessels, they would run the gamut from aircraft carriers to destroyers to submarines, covering all the boats in the navy (not that there is warlike intent in anything I write!). Each ship has its own purposes, its own role: they are designed so that one complements the others. And so it is with my writing. What form will I employ at a given moment? It depends entirely on how I feel at the time. There’s no set rotation, no predetermined sequence—instead, I let things take their own natural course, following wherever my heart leads. “I want to start planning a longer work,” I may think, or, on another occasion, “I feel like writing short stories.” Once that feeling has made itself clear, I can select the appropriate container. I never have any problem deciding which one to choose. “This is what I’m doing now,” I decide, and that’s that. If it’s short stories I’m writing, I focus on them and ignore everything else.

Still, when all is said and done, I consider myself first and foremost a writer of full-length novels. I approach short stories and novellas with the same focus, and regard the finished works with affection, but my principal battleground has been and remains the novel: some may disagree, but I think it is there that my most distinctive—and probably my best—qualities as a writer stand out. My makeup is that of a long-distance runner, which means I need considerable time and distance to pull things together in a full and comprehensive way. If I were an airplane, I would be the kind that requires a lengthy runway to get off the ground.

Short stories are agile vehicles that can be maneuvered to cover the smaller topics that novels can’t handle very well. They are perfect for launching bold new experiments, whether stylistic or plot-based, and treating material for which their form is particularly well suited. They are like a fine net that can scoop up and give shape to hard-to-grasp aspects of my inner self. And they don’t require much time to write. If I am in the mood, I can turn one out in a few days in a single spontaneous flow. There are times when I find the short story’s lightness and versatility to be an absolute necessity. Nevertheless—and here I must stipulate that I am speaking only for myself—the form does not give me the room to express all that is within me in the way I want.

When I set out to write a novel that is likely to possess special meaning to me—in other words, a comprehensive, potentially transformative work—I need free access to a vast, unlimited space. Once I am sure that space exists and that I have stockpiled enough energy to fill it, I open the spigots full blast, so to speak, and settle in for the long haul. Nothing can surpass the fullness I experience then. It is a special feeling, one I get only when I am launching a long novel.

It strikes me that, at the risk of exaggeration, long novels are my lifeblood, while short stories and novellas are more like practice pieces, important and useful steps toward the construction of longer works. You could compare this to the way long-distance runners think—we may keep track of our records in the five-thousand- and ten-thousand-meter races, but our true standard is our time in the marathon.



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So let me now talk about how I compose my novels. More specifically, I would like to speak generally about how I write, using my long novels as concrete examples. Of course, just as the content of my novels differs from one to the next, so do the manner of their composition, where they were written, and how long they took to complete. Nevertheless, as far as I can tell, the overall pattern—the basic sequence of steps, the “rules” I follow and so forth—doesn’t vary that much. This formula, if it can be called that, pushes me to establish a fixed routine within my life and work—then and only then does writing a full-length novel become possible. Since a novel is a long-term project requiring an inordinate amount of energy, creating this solid base is absolutely crucial. If I screw that up, my strength may give out partway through.