Quotes and notes from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
In every interview I’m asked what’s the most important quality a novelist has to have. It’s pretty obvious: talent. No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literally talent you can forget about being a novelist. If you don’t have any fuel, even the best car can’t win. If I’m asked what the next most important quality is for a novelist, that’s easy too: focus—the ability to concentrate all your limited talent or even a shortage of it. I generally concentrate on work for three or four hours every morning. I sit at my desk and focus totally on what I’m writing. In private correspondence the great mystery writer Raymond Chandler once confessed that even if he didn’t write anything, he made sure he sat down at his desk every single day and concentrated.
The point about focus is especially interesting to me. Lines up with that story from Snowball, where Buffett and Gates both said the most important asset they had was Focus.
The same goes for the heart. My pulse is generally around fifty beats per minute, which I think is pretty slow. But if I run for about thirty minutes it rises to about seventy. After I run as hard as I can it gets near one hundred. So it’s only after running that my pulse gets up to the level of most people’s resting rate.
What I mean is, a person’s mind is controlled by his body, right? Or it it the opposite—the way your mind works influences the structure of the body? Or do the body and mind closely influence each other and act on each other?
I never take two days off in a row. Muscles are like work animals that are quick on the uptake. If you carefully increase the load, step by step, they learn to take it. As long as you explain your expectations to them by actually showing them examples of the amount of work they have to endure, your muscles will comply and gradually get stronger… Muscles really are like animals, and they want to take it as easy as possible; if pressure isn’t applied to them, they relax and cancel out the memory of all that work.
Human beings naturally continue doing things they like, and don’t continue doing what they don’t like… That’s why I’ve never recommended running to others. The most important thing we ever learn at school is the fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school. When I’m criticized unjustly (from my viewpoint, at least), or when someone I’m sure will understand me doesn’t, I go running for a little longer than usual. By running longer it’s like I can physically exhaust that portion of my discontent.
A gentlemen shouldn’t go on and on about what he does to stay fit. At least that’s how I see it.
Review: I liked it. It was a quick read. Murakami has a way of writing simple sentences that don’t actually seem right but somewhat flow. I wonder if this is partly translation? Find some example of this. Anyways I liked it. It has actually inspired me to start running ~3 times a week. Especially his point about his heart rate being down in the doctors office. I want to have that!
And running slow for long periods instead of pushing yourself hard every run. And the idea of taming your muscles like wild animals.
And the idea that writing is like a poison, and you need a healthful body to combat it.
And it’s making me think about what talent means. Especially for a writer.
And it’s making me realize that even though his words come out as if he’s just writing them on the fly, a ton of editing and re-writing goes into this. He mentions that in the post script, how this took a lot of editing.