Month: December 2011

There were probably a few warning signs that I wasn’t going to enjoy Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (WITAWITAR).

The first is that I hate running. As in the very theme that, er, underpins the book. The second is that I expected Murakami’s WITAWITAR book to be of the ilk of Stephen King’s On Writing, which is something of a writing-inspiration masterpiece. The third, and probably most telling, is that I hated the only other Murakami book I’ve read. Hmm.

I’m not sure where Kafka on the Shore sits in Murakami’s hierarchy of masterpieces, but methinks that doesn’t matter—I can’t stand tales that include off-the-wall moments that aren’t ever embeded in some sort of believable context. Sure, fiction is made up, but it still (to borrow a trite cliché) needs to be believable enough to take you on the journey. Suffice to say, me and Murakami are probably incompatible.

Still, I thought, WITAWITAR is non-fiction and focuses on how running informs and impels Murakami’s writing process and subsequent success. Surely if I replace ‘running’ with ‘football’, ‘netball’, ‘walking’, or ‘doing Pilates’, I’ll be able to appreciate his technique and discipline and potentially pick up a few tips. Hmm again.

Murakami says on page two that ‘…this is a book in which I’ve gathered my thoughts about what running has meant to me as a person. Just a book in which I ponder various things and think out loud.’ Ponder he does, although I might risk blasphemy and hate email by saying that he probably shouldn’t have published the ponderings. As I explained it to some writer and editor friends, I guess that’s what happens when you get to a certain level of success: you can put poo on a page and they’ll publish it.

My main gripes with WITAWITAR is that the book reads a bit like a randomly organised stream-of-consciousness diary entry, and it drives me batty with its random tense changes and leaps back and forth in time. Nor does it contain anything particularly insightful or profound. Murakami includes excerpts of some articles he’s written for top-tier magazines about running. And those excerpts are not very good. Sigh. See note above about poo on a page.

I’m also not sure Murakami’s methods would necessarily work for me. For example, he stops each day when he feels that he could write more, saying that it makes the next day’s writing easier. Really? I reckon I’d spend the night trying desperately not to lose the ideas and momentum that threatened to evaporate like mist. And I’d probably spend the next day agonising over the fact that they had.

If I’m really honest, I might also say that I think writing and writing success have come too easily to Murakami for me to truly respect him. He simply sold a jazz bar he owned and operated and, without precursor, decided to write. His first manuscript was immediately published. The book won an award and was critically acclaimed and just about every other book he’s written with near-mechanical method ever since has met with similar applaud.

It’s a one-in-a-billion kind of success and is misleading for newbie or wannabe writers—not even JK Rowling, the other author whose success has inspired (and continues to inspire) legions of people to take up pen and keyboard and write, was so fortunate. Her book was rejected by some record number of publishers (who are now likely crying themselves to sleep every night over the career-limiting move they made and the millions of dollars of revenue they’ve missed out on) before Bloomsbury, a then-small publishing house, decided to pick it up.

Perhaps I’m being a little harsh. No writer can extol guaranteed secrets to writing fame and fortune in a short book (or even a long one)—if they could this topic would be done and dusted and there would be a bestseller bonanza as everyone applied the secrets to their writing trade. Besides, there were a few gems within the pages of WITAWITAR, even if I’d argue they weren’t worth the resources expended to uncover them.

For example, Murakami advocates making writing (like running) a habit. He follows Raymond Chandler’s advice to sit down at your desk and concentrate every day, even if you don’t write. I follow this too (well, for the most part or maybe occasionally with aspirations to do it much better). Murakami also says that the ‘most important thing we ever learn at school is that fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school’. I’d second that, although I wish someone had told me that while I was at school…

Have you read WITAWITAR? What did you think? Am I being too scathing? Did I miss the point along the way? Or are Murakami and I incompatible, whether under fiction or non-fiction reading and writing circumstances?

When God Was a Rabbit (WGWAR) would have bypassed me had a friend not told me she bought it and loved it—cried with laughter, in fact—after spotting someone reading it on a plane. And had I bothered to research its author and plotline before buying it on this recommendation, I probably would have bypassed it. Thankfully there was no bypassing by either the book or by me, and WGWAR captured my attention fully.

WGWAR is a Sunday Times bestseller and its back cover contains rave reviews from the likes of the Observer, Daily Mail, and Guardian, which variously and respectively espouse that the book is: ‘Captivating…rendered with an appealing frankness, precision, and emotional acuity’; ‘Beguiling…you can’t quite get the voice out of your head’; and ‘Sharply funny, whimsical and innovative’.

It’s all of those and more, but because I can’t summon anything more insightful or intelligent than those above, I’ll simply give you a synopsis of the tale and author. Sarah Winman is an actor turned writer, with WGWAR her first book. That alone would have put me off summarily with an eye-rolling scoff and healthy dose of envy that she should achieve such success at the first turn of her hand. But digging a little deeper I found an actor whose career hasn’t been as successful as she’d have liked and a writer all along—Winman has penned a number of scripts and WGWAR is simply her first novel.

She also has an incredible grasp of language, with the words she’s chosen to convey her tale at once both perfectly flawless and timed. That’s perhaps what gets you in the most because the tale itself is simple (or at least, deceptively so). Its protagonist is a girl and it centres on her, her brother, her parents, her best friend, her brother’s best friend, their aunt, and a small number of other characters that come to be part of their lives. Their lives are fairly small, the book focusing on the minutiae of their existences. At the same time, this narrow focus allows the complex stories of their lives to unfold.

I’m still not sure which parts were so funny they warranted my friend absolutely cacking herself over them. Sure, there were plenty of parts that I found mildly amusing or that impressed me, but none that had me laughing out loud. More surprising, was at how Winman tugged at my heartstrings—I thought I was powering through the book well, yet she managed to floor me.

That’s not to say there weren’t moments she frustrated me. The book starts and is largely set in England and relatively free from being anchored by moments in history, so the inclusion and attempted claiming of—spoiler alert—September 11 and the subsequent amnesia felt clichéd and wholly unnecessary. That might just be my interpretation, though, and I’ll admit that I may have missed some key markers. I did, after all, miss what Winman explained to be central themes of violence. I was like, er, really? I also found the whole God/rabbit thing tenuous at best.

I have to commend Winman, though, for her honesty in the Life as a Writer section at the end of the book. It’s not something she needed to include and could have continued the ‘muse’ mystery so many writers uphold. Instead she says: ‘There was no great epiphany, no precise moment when I swapped the spoken word for the written word,’ before outlining a disillusionment with acting and the ‘secrets’ to her writing success.

‘It’s not that long ago that I was sitting in front of authors listening to them reveal their secrets for literary success. I’ve heard people ask what pencils they use, ask how many hours a day one needs to write, ask, basically, how to do it. All I know is that there is no one way, and every writer approaches the process differently.’

That doesn’t stop it being endlessly interesting—even to those of us who live it daily. The approach that works for her tends to be that she writes from mid-morning until dark and aims for 1000 words a day because after 70–80 days she’ll have a first draft of a novel. It’s a waste of time trying to write like someone else, she says, so stick with your style (while always trying to improve it, of course), believe in yourself, and: ‘If you only have an hour to write: write. If you have a day: write.’ She also says: ‘…find the reason that makes you write.’

All of that is, perhaps, what this novel exudes. It was a labour of love. Whether her second book will be the same I don’t know (I presume her publishing house has shackled her to her desk for at least another book based on the success of this first one).

But I’m glad I’ve read her first one, because as a work of fiction that focuses on a family it’s one I wouldn’t normally pick up. Because her writing style is fresh, insightful, surprising, and inspiring. And because her pragmatic examination of her writing style and processes have been a creative while realistic shot in the arm for me. It makes me want to sit down and write.

I said I’d check back in as soon as I’d finished book two of The Hunger Games, but didn’t end up doing that because I:

a)      would have been saying roughly the same things I’d said about the first book, i.e. that I, like, totally loved it

b)     raced straight on to reading the third.

Having finished all three, I’m still thinking about the trilogy, turning over its concepts and plot devices in my mind—something that’s a sign of a story told well. Admittedly, the first book’s slated to be released as a film in coming days, but I know I’d be too snobby to read the film tie-in version of the book.

I’m fairly relieved I can claim the ‘I, like, totally read this before it was a mainstream film’ moral high ground (even if we both know the reading was by a matter of weeks). The series also definitely sated some of my Vampire Academy thirst and I’m pleased to have discovered one I wouldn’t have otherwise known. Thanks again for the recommendation, guys.

What I haven’t worked out is whether I love or hate is how the trilogy surprised and steered me away from the story arc I expected. I definitely like being surprised—predictable heroes’ journeys get old fast, and Joseph Campbell’s thousand-faced hero has been done a thousand times a thousand times over—but with The Hunger Games trilogy I constantly felt as though I was on a roller coaster.

And when I say roller coaster, I mean in part the ups and downs and adrenalin, but mostly how you think you’re set on a particular course and are then suddenly jerked in a completely different, whiplash-inducing direction. That’s not a bad thing, because the new course was invariably interesting, but I retained an element of wondering what would have happened had we stayed the original course. Was this where Collins wanted to take me, asked a little nagging voice in my mind, or did she find writing the climactic confrontation too scary and too hard?

Likewise, I was surprised that although Katniss was a strong, capable protagonist, things seemed to happen to and around her, she didn’t necessarily take part, and the tale leapt forward. Say, for example (and I’m issuing spoiler alerts from here on—if you haven’t yet read the trilogy but plan to, read on at your peril), at the climax in the arena in the second book, which then fast forwarded to them being in District 13, as well as some of the major rebellion battles, which she only heard about afterwards. Then there was the time when she was advancing towards killing Snow and suddenly the battle was all over. Or how her trial took place without her knowledge or even one iota of participation—Katniss in the witness box, I reckon, would have been explosively good reading.

Of course, this removal from the action could have been in part to show that there were bigger machinations were at work and Katniss was a pawn in a number of characters’ games. It also usefully enabled the already three-dimensional story to suddenly jump back to a virtual wide shot reveal a fourth dimension, such as when the victors she thought were out to get her were actually risking their own lives to save hers.

I was intrigued and impressed too (if the latter’s really the right word) that the victors were incapacitated by or at least desperately suffered as a result of their in-arena experiences. It wasn’t named as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but I couldn’t help but think that that was what it was and how it leant the books and the tale a darker, more realistic element than is currently seen in young-adult fiction. It also shaped the tale itself, with characters staying true to their issues rather than suddenly stepping back up to be heroic victors at the slightest sniff of action.

I also respected Collins’ decision to write Katniss as not just flawed, but not entirely likeable—she often thought, said, and did things that we’ve all thought about but never done. And don’t get me started on the love triangle that was less clear and more grey and surprising than one other love triangle that springs to mind—that of a certain human girl, a vampire, and a werewolf. I’ll stop short of saying who Katniss ends up choosing, but I will say that I couldn’t confidently (and without changing my mind a chapter later) tell who she’d pick until I read it on the page (maybe that was just me, though, and it was obvious to you all along). I also liked that although love was a key part of the story, it didn’t dominate it.

So, all that’s left now is to check out the film and compare it with the books. Invariably, the love triangle is going to be ramped up and Katniss sexed up like a juvenile Lara Croft. What else do you think will change?