I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
In his essay on originality in Novelist as Vocation, Japanese writer Haruki Murakami suggests that to find your original voice you don’t need to add to what you are doing but rather eliminate the unnecessary:
Speaking from experience, it seems that I discovered my “original” voice and style, at the outset, not adding to what I already knew but subtracting from it. Think how many—far too many—things we pick up in the course of living. Whether we choose to call it information overload or excess baggage, we have that multitude of options to choose from, so that when we try to express ourselves creatively, all those choices collide with each other and we shut down, like a stalled engine. We become paralyzed. Our best recourse is to clear out our information system by chucking all that is unnecessary into the garbage bin, allowing our mind to move freely again.
How do you decide which things are crucial and which are not? Murakami says one thing to ask yourself is, “Am I having a good time doing this?” He says, “a rich, spontaneous joy lies at the root of all creative expression.”
I wasn’t having a good time writing essays for Things Men Gave Me, but I was having fun doing the paintings to go with them. It made no sense to me that I wasn’t enjoying it, because I really do love to write. I find a lot of joy blogging here each morning, and I enjoy writing newsletter articles too, but I wasn’t enjoying writing the TMGM essays.
So I changed it up. I tried converting the three published essays into flash stories, keeping them to a few hundred words. There are various definitions of flash, some allowing as many as 1,000 words, but I didn’t pick a strict word count limit. I just figured out how to extract the salient elements of each essay and turn it into what I hoped were engaging stories.
This made the writing exciting again. Now I’m working on a story that might or might not qualify as flash, but I feel so much energy writing it. I winnowed down what I was addressing in the story to something very defined, something very concise, an epiphany I had about my history of skiing. And then I’m writing to express that one thing.
Did I get rid of the extraneous and unnecessary? If so, I’m not really sure what that would be. I do know that I cut down my word count, and I probably eliminated some sort of thing in the essays that I didn’t need to include.
Murakami traces his originality to the principle of freedom. He took up novel writing in his late twenties when he had a sudden epiphany that he could, and wanted to, write a novel. He didn’t know much about writing a novel. He wasn’t immersed in the Japanese literary world. He just sat down and started.
On expressing yourself freely, he writes:
[It’s] probably best not to start out by asking “What am I seeking?” Rather it’s better to ask “Who would I be if I weren’t seeking anything?” and then try to visualize that aspect of yourself. Asking “What am I seeking?” invariably leads you to ponder heavy issues. The heavier that discussion gets, the farther freedom retreats, and the slower your footwork becomes. The slower your footwork, the less lively the prose. When that happens, your writing won’t charm anyone—possibly even you.
As I’m reading Jung and Jungians on how to live well at midlife, I do find myself pondering that question, “What am I seeking?” I find myself sitting with difficult ideas about what it means to live with integrity and consciousness.
Maybe too much emphasis on that is taking away my freedom, making my writing more ponderous, and also leading me away from good things in my life.
Murakami says, “The you who is not seeking anything… is as light and free as a butterfly.”
This applies to writing, art, and life itself.
My writing is best when I do it because I love to do it, not because I’m trying to achieve something by it.
My painting is better when I don’t hold too tightly to some conception of how it’s going to turn out, and when I don’t think “how can I make art that will win a prize, or sell?”
My life is better when I hold loosely to ideas of what is going to happen, how elements of my life will arise and go away, what I will do in the future.
Murakami quotes Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert: “To reach the source, you have to swim against the current. Only trash swims downstream.”
Originality requires that you to do things that other people aren’t doing; that’s the basic requirement. But that’s not always easy. It’s hard to do things that no one else is doing. I don’t think anyone else in the world right now is writing flash memoir pieces combined with abstract acrylic art. It’s not a thing that is done, to my knowledge. And it’s not a thing that’s obviously going anywhere commercial.
Murakami shares a line from The New York Times, about the American debut of the Beatles: “They produced a sound that was fresh, energetic, and unmistakably their own.” He uses that as a definition of originality: “Fresh, energetic, and unmistakably your own.”
When I’m doing work that is fresh, energetic, and unmistakably my own it feels wonderful. I’m lucky that I get to do that every day of my life.
Where is it going? I don’t know. Does that matter? Probably not.