Talent, Focus & Endurance
Happy Friday everyone!
This week, I'm stopping the work on the Elemental Genres series to bring you something altogether different. I recently finished reading Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and: wow. What a book.
In this edition, I'm going to be exploring the ideas of effort and resilience in writing with the help of Murakami's memoir/running log. I hope you enjoy it!
Everybody uses their mind when they think. But a writer puts on an outfit called narrative and thinks with his entire being; and for the novelist that process requires putting into play all your physical reserve, often to the point of overexertion.
(Photo by Steven Lelham on Unsplash)
What makes a successful novelist?
According to Murakami, there are three qualities all novelists should have if they want to be successful. These are:
Talent
Focus
Endurance
(Note: I do not mean commercial success, and neither, I think, does Murakami. What I mean by success is the ability to be proud of the writing you do, and to tell the stories you want to tell in the best way possible.)
Let's break them down further: When writing about the concept of talent for writing, Murakami says this is more of a prerequisite than anything else.
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 literary talent you can forget about being a novelist. This is more of a prerequisite than a necessary quality. If you don't have any fuel, even the best car won't run.
Stephen King wrote something similar in his memoir On Writing, where he pointed out that you could teach an okay writer to be good and a good writer to be great, but you could never teach a shitty writer to be good in the same way you couldn't teach a great writer to be a genius. I happen to agree. Why this is the case, I have no idea. Life is not always fair.
Anyways... What about the other two? Regarding focus, Murakami writes:
If I'm asked what the next most important quality for a novelist, that's easy too: focus—the ability to concentrate all your limited talents on whatever's critical at the moment. Without that you can't accomplish anything of value, while, if you can focus effectively, you'll be able to compensate for an erratic talent or even a shortage of it.
And on the matter of endurance (or resilience), he says:
If you concentrate on writing three or four hours a day and feel tired after a week of this, you're not going to be able to write a long work. 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, or a year, two years.
That all makes sense, doesn't it? (And it also happens to be beautiful prose, which is always a plus.) Without these three things: talent, focus, and endurance, you have no shot at being a writer and, especially, a novelist (or any other kind of long-form writing.) But what now?
Never-mind Talent…
The problem with talent, though, is that in most cases the person involved can't control its amount or quality.
Talent you cannot improve on. That is why you should ignore it. But the thing is: you do not need an exorbitant amount of talent to become a writer. Talent is, I think, often a different way of saying 'passion' or, if you want to be less dramatic, 'interest.' If you want to be a successful writer, you need a baseline amount of talent, sure.
But I haven't met a single person who is both interested in / passionate about writing and does not meet that baseline quota. Also: if you're reading this, you've probably met the cut already, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.
Back To Focus & Endurance
The thing about tripods is that if you remove one leg, the whole thing falls to the ground. And make no mistake, the talent/focus/endurance triad is a tripod. Focus and endurance are just as vital for writing as talent is. The good news is:
These two disciplines-focus and endurance-are different from talent, since they can be acquired and sharpened through training.
In other words: focus and endurance you can improve upon. The even better news is that when you work at improving one, you improve the other. How? I've touched on this in the very first edition of Fiction Notes, titled How I Practice at Being A Fiction Writer. Here's what I wrote:
1. Like Tyler Cowen, I write every day. I write in the mornings, with the goal of 1000 words per day, and don't turn on my phone until I am done. It's 45 minutes on, 15 minutes off. Then another 45, followed by a thirty-minute rest and one final hour-long session.
And also:
6. As I mentioned earlier, I stay away from my phone as much as possible. I think of the (creative) mind like a lens to focus rays of attention. And I know phones to be attention-stealing devices. So... yeah. No phone.
Murakami uses running as a metaphor to illustrate this point:
In the three months till now I was basically trying to rack up the distance, not worrying about anything, but steadily increasing my pace and running as hard as I could. And this helped me build up my overall strength: I got more stamina, built up my muscles, spurred myself on both physically and mentally. The most important task here was to let my body know in no uncertain terms that up running this hard is just part of the course. When I say letting it know in no uncertain terms I'm speaking figuratively, of course. No matter how much you might command your body to perform, don't count on it to immediately obey. The body is an extremely practical system. You have to let it experience intermittent pain over time, and then the body will get the point. As a result, it will willingly accept (or maybe not) the increased amount of exercise it's made to do. After this, you very gradually increase the upper limit of the amount of exercise you do. Doing it gradually is important so you don't burn out. (...) Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that's why I've put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level.
And if you want it translated to writing-related terms:
You'll naturally learn both concentration and endurance when you sit down every day at your desk and train yourself to focus on one point. This is a lot like the training of muscles I wrote of a moment ago. You have to continually transmit the object of your focus to your entire you to write every single day and concentrate on the work at hand. And gradually you in body, and make sure it thoroughly assimilates the information necessary for expanding the limits of what you're able to do. Almost imperceptibly you'll make the bar rise.
The key is, then: it's all about effort and resilience. If you want to improve as a writer (and since you can't control the amount of talent you were born with), what you have to do is work at improving those two other, less attractive qualities. And there are many ways to do so, starting with but not limited to taking writing seriously and doing more of it.
One way is exercising, running. Murakami never says it explicitly, but it is clear that he views his running practice and his writing as intrinsically linked, the one lifting up the other. And I've found the same for myself. This is why, in the first Fiction Notes edition, I also wrote:
7. I exercise at least 3 times a week. For me, it's boxing, tennis and weight-lifting. I golf occasionally, too. This is a huge topic, which I'm not going to expand on right now. Let's just say the more I exercise, the better I write.
Oh, and before you go...
One Last Thing About Talent.
Murakami writes that talent is not necessarily a static quality:
Writers blessed with talent to spare go through this process unconsciously, in some cases oblivious to it. Especially when they're young, as long as they have a certain level of talent it's not so difficult for them to write a novel. They easily clear all kinds of hurdles. Being young means your whole body is filled with a natural vitality. Focus and endurance appear as needed, and you never need to seek them on your own. If you're young and talented, it's like you have wings. In most cases, though, as youth fades, that sort of freeform vigor loses its natural vitality and brilliance. After you pass a certain age, things you were able to do easily aren't so easy anymore-just as a fastball pitcher's speed starts to slip away with time.
Maybe I just fell prey to the Dunning–Kruger effect, but... I'm pretty sure I used to be one of those young writers with prodigy-level talent. I could create entire worlds, write entire novels without thinking twice about it. I could 'easily clear all kinds of hurdles.' But not anymore, it seems.
Sure, I'm not that old (I’m turning 25 next week) but... that youthful energy, that 'freeform vigor' faded a couple of years ago, and now everything just seems so much harder. Now, I'm left with (on my best days) a decent amount of talent, having to work on my focus and endurance, having to write more, and read more, and learn more, to write the kind of books I want to write. And I'm okay with that.
The important thing is that my love for writing, the one that got me started when I was a child in the first place, has not faded. Not one bit. Each day, it only grows stronger. And that, I'm pretty sure, is all I can ask for.
That's it for today! Have a great weekend,
Matias
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