For Japanese author Haruki Murakami, writing is not an abstract thing. Rather, it helps him make the world concrete.

"I'm not that good at logical argument, or abstract thought. The only way I can think about things in any kind of order is by putting them in writing."

Murakami’s “Novelist as Vocation” will disappoint anyone who romanticizes the writing life.

Writing is dreary work, Murakami confesses. "Sitting there alone, they look over what they've accomplished and quietly nod to themselves," he writes of the process.

"It may be that later when the novel comes out, not a single reader will notice the improvement they made that day."

"The way I see it, people with brilliant minds are not particularly well-suited to writing novels,"he wrote."The writing of a novel, or the telling of a story, is an activity that takes place at a slow pace, in low-gear, so to speak..."

Even the lowly critic, he notes, is smarter than the writer. “Their brains move at a more rapid speed.” The act of criticism is the re-pacing of a novel to a faster pace.

Novelists are an odd sort. They’re lousy role models. They aren’t particularly amiable or fair-minded. Their lifestyles are odd.

The word writers do is tedious, like building a miniature ship in a bottle.

You’re basically doing the same thing over and over: transposing some personal theme into different contexts.

"Novel writing is indeed a most inefficient undertaking, consisting of repeating 'for instance' over and over," he wrote.

For Murakamai, who has published 15 novels, the key to novel writing came to him not in learning, but in unlearning.

"I discovered my original voice and style at the outset, not adding to what I already knew, but subtracting from it," he wrote.

He gave up on the idea of creating something sophisticated. Forget all the preconceived notions of what makes for a good novel. He did not need to be an acrobat with the vocabulary, a daredevil of the sentence structure..

Instead, he set down his feelings and thoughts as they came to him, in a way that he found pleasing.

"I could express my thoughts and feelings with a limited set of words and grammatical structures, as long as I combined them effectively and linked them together in a skillful manner.”

In the end, a writer's greatest responsibility is to his readers, to keep providing them with “the best work he is capable of turning out," he wrote.

At first, the writing might seem slight, but that’s natural.

Originality might seem sickly, or outrageous, or just weird. This is because we have not created a context around it yet.

Enthusiasm will be your guide.

If you are not finding joy in the writing, then something is wrong. Look for the dead weight and remove that.

"A rich, spontaneous joy lies at the root of all creative expression," he wrote.

In the end, though writing is a dreary activity, the good writer brings everything they got.

"If the writing can't be made as good as it is within us to make it, then why do it? In the end, it's all we have, the only thing we can take into the grave."

"The narrower and the more specialized the field, I have found, the prouder the authorities tend to be, and the stronger their antipathy to outsiders."

“What I was seeking by writing first in English and then translating into Japanese was no less than the creation of an unadorned neutral style that would allow me freer movement."

"I can't help thinking that novelists share something in common with those who spend a year or more assembling miniature boats in bottles with long tweezers."

"Say there is a personal theme you wish to develop, so you transpose it into a different context."

"I'm a person with a fixed vision, and a fixed process for giving that vision shape. Unavoidably, sustaining that process entails an all-encompassing lifestyle"

"That's not because it has lost its originality with time. Rather, that originality has become one with our perception so that naturally, it has become a part of us."

"It is far more difficult to properly assess in real time new forms of expression in our immediate environment. That is because they often contain elements seen as unpleasant, unnatural, nonsensical, or sometimes even antisocial"

"They tend to apprehend the newcomer with abhorrence and disgust, because in a worst-case scenario, the very ground upon which they stand might fall away from under them."=

"Originality is a living, evolving thing, whose shape is devilishly hard to pin down. "

"Better to evoke a strong response, even a negative one, than to elicit nothing but humdrum comments and lukewarm praise."

"If you're not enjoying yourself when you are engaged in what seems important to you, if you can't find a spontaneous pleasure and joy in it, if your heart doesn't leap in excitement, then there is likely something wrong..."

·"...When that happens, you have to go back to the beginning and start discarding any extraneous parts or unnatural elements."·

"Before you start writing your own stuff, make a habit of looking at things and events in more detail. Observe what is going on around you and the people you encounter as closely and as deeply as you can."

"When a reader has a problem, there's usually something that needs fixing, whether or not it corresponds to their suggestions."

"As physical strength declines -- I'm speaking in general terms here -- There's a subtle decline in mental fitness too."

"Practicing physical moderation is indispensable in order to keep on being a novelist."

"All creative activity is, to some extent, done partly with the intention to rectify, or fix yourself."