Recently I read autobiographical essays by two writers. One is "Writing" by American writer Stephen King. I have not read any of his other novels. I only know about the adaptation of the famous movie "The Shawshank Redemption". From his novel; the other is "My Profession is a Novelist" by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, and I read "Norwegian Wood" written by him more than 20 years ago.
How does being a writer work as a profession? With this doubt, I opened these two books and read them in one go.
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Being a writer as a profession is very different from ordinary professions. According to the current professional division of labor, there is no writing major in universities. You can find a job as a writer after graduation. There are probably no companies that will recruit a bunch of writers and check in to write at a fixed time every day. It seems that the only skills a writer needs are language and writing. Maybe it is not difficult to write something, but it does not seem to be easy to become a professional writer.
It is an extremely difficult thing to support a family by writing novels and work hard as a novelist. Like everything else in life, luck and chance are important factors. More importantly, however, it requires something like a "qualification." If this thing exists, it does exist; if it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist. Of course, some people are born with it, while others acquire it through hard work.
These people can be active as professional novelists for twenty or thirty years, or survive and have a certain number of readers. They must have an excellent and solid core as novelists. That is the inner drive to write novels and the strong endurance to support long-term lonely labor. Perhaps it can be said that this is the qualification and qualification of a professional novelist.
—— Haruki Murakami
Murakami-kun defines the "qualifications" of a professional writer. The so-called career is one that can support your life and life. Mr. Jin also had similar views on this:
I try to tell you how a writer grows. It’s not about how writers are created; I don’t think writers can be created, neither environment nor personal will can create a writer. Like all human fields that require talent and creativity, the group of writers is also pyramid-shaped. At the bottom of the pyramid are bad writers. On the upper level are less important but popular writers who are competent writers. The layer above is much smaller. They are truly good writers. Above them—above most writers—were people like Shakespeare, Faulkner, Yeats, Bernard Shaw, and Eudora Welty. They are geniuses, a stroke of genius in creation.
It is impossible to transform a bad writer into a competent writer, and similarly, a good writer cannot become a great master no matter how hard he works. But a barely competent writer can improve into a good writer through hard work.
——Stephen King
What Mr. Jin means is that it is difficult to develop the qualifications of a writer. People without that kind of "core" cannot do this profession. And once you get the "writer's qualification certificate", you will also face a similar hierarchical pyramid like other professions, with geniuses occupying the top. Mr. Jin said that through more than thirty years of hard writing, I have climbed to the penultimate level of "good writers", but I have never been able to cross the top dividing line, which is why I am so happy.
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Being a writer is a freelance profession, but a freelance profession is also a profession that requires a high degree of self-discipline. Freedom and self-discipline, contradiction and unity. Writers can choose the time and place to write at will. This is the freedom of choice. After making the choice, they must lock themselves for a period of time, fix themselves in one place, and begin to create wholeheartedly.
The place may be humble, but one thing is essential: a door that you are willing to close. When you close the door, you are telling the world in your own way, and also telling yourself that you are true to your word and that you are keeping away mundane things. When you write, you want the world to disappear, don't you? Of course it is. When you write, you create your own world.
Once I start writing a book, I don't stop or slow down unless I have to. If I don't write every day, the characters in my head will start to look different.
——Stephen King
When writing a novel, I set myself to write ten pages a day, with each page containing 400 words. Even if you still want to continue writing in your heart, you still have to stop at about ten pages; even if you feel that you can’t muster the energy today, you must muster up your energy to finish ten pages. Because when doing a long-term job, regularity is of great significance. When you are writing well, you will take advantage of the situation and write more, and when you are not writing well, you will stop writing. This will not produce regularity. So I just write a time card, basically no more, no less, just ten pages every day.
—— Haruki Murakami
Once they start writing, they are extremely regular and self-disciplined. Unless there is an accident, they will maintain a fixed writing rhythm every day until they complete the first draft. Such day-to-day writing activities are destined to be an extremely lonely profession. According to Mr. Jin: "Writing a novel is like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. You will often have self-doubt." And Murakami-kun said. He used another metaphor: "When writing a novel, I always feel as if I am sitting alone at the bottom of a deep well. No one will come to rescue me, no one will come to pat you on the shoulder and say 'Today' Well done'".
Freedom, self-discipline, loneliness, and doubt are probably the key words of the writer's profession.
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After understanding the working mode of writers, you can probably understand why it is difficult to plan a career as a writer. Even Mr. Kim and Murakami did not initially plan to pursue a career as a writer.
Mr. Jin started writing stories when he was more than ten years old and then submitted them. After that, he stopped writing stories. It lasted for more than ten years, from middle school to college graduation, to working, getting married, and having children. Slowly, I started to receive rejection letters (Mr. Jin said this can be considered an improvement) from having no articles to writing, until I published it for the first time.
After his first publication, could Mr. Jin make a career out of writing? No. Because the remuneration for my first publication was only a few dollars, and I couldn’t even support myself. He just continued to write the next work, until he didn't know which one it was, and it achieved unprecedented success and sold for a lot of money.
"Are you sitting still?" Bill (Mr. King's publishing agent) asked. "No," I said, "I have to sit down and talk?" "I'm afraid," he said, "We sold the rights to the paperback edition of Carrie to Signet Publishing House for four hundred thousand dollars." I was so shocked that I couldn't speak. My feet went weak, but to be precise, I didn't fall to the ground. I just slid down and sat down in the aisle. "Are you sure you're not mistaken?" I asked Bill. He said absolutely not. I asked him to say the number again, slowly and clearly, so that I could understand it clearly and not misunderstand. He said the amount was four, followed by five zeros. "Then there is the decimal point, and there are two zeros after the decimal point." He added.
——Stephen King
It was Mother's Day in May 1973. Mr. Jin and his family were crowded in a rented house for $90 a month. On this day, Mr. Jin believed that he had obtained the "qualification as a writer."
I write for my own satisfaction. I may have paid off my mortgage and sent my kids to college, but these are all fringe benefits, and I'm looking for the fun that I can indulge in. Writing is not life, but I think it is sometimes a path back to life.
——Stephen King
This is the inner driving force why Mr. Kim started writing and continues to write, but Murakami-kun is different. Murakami graduated from Waseda with a drama major, but his university experience was rather tortuous. Classes were suspended due to student unrest, and it took him seven years to graduate. So in the middle of college, he borrowed money to run a tavern and started his first job, rather than entering the workplace in the usual sense, because he described himself as a person who could not stand the sense of class in the workplace.
Usually everyone graduates from college first, then gets a job, and then gets married and starts a family after a period of time. In fact, I got married first, then started working due to the pressure of life, and then finally graduated and left school. In short, it is difficult for life to operate step by step and according to established goals.
—— Haruki Murakami
Before the age of thirty, Murakami basically struggled to run a tavern and pay off debts. One afternoon when he was thirty, he went to the baseball field to drink beer and watch the game, and a thought suddenly came to him: "Yes, maybe I can also write novels." It was like an epiphany, which started his career as a novelist for more than 40 years.
In a way, I responded to that epiphany feeling in my own way. Late at night, after finishing work in the store, I sat at the kitchen table and started writing a novel. After the first work was completed, it was sent out without even leaving a manuscript. If it was not published, it might disappear and not start a career as a novelist.
—— Haruki Murakami
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Mr. Jin has loved reading horror stories and watching horror movies and TV series since he was a child, so he basically only writes horror stories he likes. I don't like horror stories, so I haven't read any of his novels. I read what I like and do what I like. Our principles are still the same. As for Murakami, in addition to reading his "Norwegian Wood" more than 20 years ago, it may also include all the works before this book. The reason for this may be that except for the title of the book, time has erased other traces of memory. .
But this year I reread "Norwegian Wood", which Murakami started writing when Japan's economic bubble was at its peak. There was a lot of hustle and bustle in Japan, and people around him only talked about finance and real estate. Murakami had no choice but to escape abroad and start writing this novel when he was 38 years old. When I re-read it in middle age, I found that my feelings about this novel have changed. It is completely different from what it was more than 20 years ago. I only know that it is different, but what it was like when I was young has been leaked from the incomplete container of memory over time. gone.
Murakami’s books have a special temperament that even he himself finds strange: “I feel that I can see a tendency around the world. When the social foundation of a country is greatly shaken (or changed), my book It will be widely read there." So after reading his autobiographical essay, I wanted to read through his other works again.
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Mr. Jin’s qualifications as a writer were obtained through hard work, while Mr. Murakami’s experience seems like natural qualifications, but there is no doubt that they are both “good writers” near the top of the writer’s pyramid, and I am writing this article. It’s probably an activity to visit this “pyramid”.
