Tag: writing

On editing

The SF-SJWs at File 770 are appalled at the fact that Tor Books and Castalia House author John C. Wright is willing to go on the record and state that,
in his opinion, I am a better editor than the late, Hugo Award-winning editor
David Hartwell:

These are the recommendations of my editor,
Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day, the most hated man in Science Fiction, but
certainly the best editor I have had the pleasure to work with.
– John C. Wright

Charming. Take this and go home, David Hartwell, as we would say in Italy.
– Anna Feruglio Dal Dan on February 17, 2016 at 3:51 am

JCW is a writer convinced that his every work is a glittering jewel of
exquisite literary craftsmanship. VD is an editor who doesn’t meddle
with his writers’ texts. (For an example of this, see “Shakedown Cruise”
in Riding the Red Horse, where Campbell nominee Rolf Nelson makes
*ahem* many interesting and innovative aesthetic choices when it comes
to things like verb tenses and punctuation, and VD lets them all stand.)

That
sort of writer is bound to get on well with that sort of editor. Bit
rough on the readers, of course, but, pffft, what do they know?
– Steve Wright on February 17, 2016

I suspect that what he was good at was being edited by David Hartwell.
– Peter J on February 17, 2016

JCW,
while styling himself as a coldly-rational intellectual, reveals that
he’s actually a fool whose opinions are driven entirely by ignorance,
arrogance, and emotion. Every thing he’s written over the last year has
made it very apparent just how much his career is owed to the efforts of
the editors at Tor who transformed his usual drivel into something
coherent.
– Aaron on February 17, 2016

It is hard to decide whether I am more flattered by the estimable Mr. Wright’s high regard or amused by the level of ignorance demonstrated by the usual suspects. The former, I am finally forced to conclude, as I have come to expect the latter from the low-IQ denizens of an otherwise very good site.

You see, I have perspective that they do not. Unlike them, I have seen Mr. Wright’s unedited prose. I know exactly what it looks like. And as it happens, it looks very much like the prose that appears in Mr. Wright’s novels that are published by Tor Books. John is an excellent writer; he is one of the greatest SF/F writers alive. But he writes very, very quickly and he is prone to what one might describe as an exuberant approach to writing. Last year, Castalia House offered him a contract for a 60k-word book. I am now reading the manuscript, which clocks in at nearly 200k words.

Even those authors who don’t like Mr. Wright or his style might well contemplate suicide if they truly understood how speedily and effortlessly the man writes… and writes well. When I say he is a great writer, I do not do so lightly, nor do I do so because I am fortunate enough to publish some of his works. I say it out of pure envy and awe.

Now, I am not privy to the details of the editing process at Tor Books. I have not discussed it with Mr. Wright or anyone else. But it would not have surprised me in the slightest to learn that it frequently consists of sending the manuscript directly to the proofreaders, correcting any infelicities of grammar and typos, then publishing the book without any real editorial activity at all. And I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that David Hartwell had not even read all of the books that he “edited” either.

As Castalia House authors know, I either edit a book or I decline to edit it. If I edit it, I decide whether I will apply a scalpel or a machete to the text. In the case of certain authors, I ask them if they would prefer a scalpel or a machete, and honor their preference even if I think it is mistaken. In one recent case, I removed one-third of the manuscript’s word count. In another case, I had the author cut out more than 20,000 words. I suspect that I have excised more words from a single novella by John C. Wright than Mr. Hartwell did from Mr. Wright’s entire oeuvre. So, not only do I “meddle in my writers’ texts”, I do so much more heavily than the average editor does.

The mistake that these File 770 commenters are making is thinking that one can reasonably judge the quality of an editor’s work by the final product. You cannot. You can only judge it by comparing the submitted draft of the manuscript to the final product. For example, my
book The World in Shadow is a MUCH better book than The War in
Heaven. It is better in every way. But the editor at Pocket Books did a brilliant job on The War
in Heaven, because the first draft was a disaster and she made me
rewrite the entire book twice, with lots of hands-on advice and examples.

But she did nothing on The World in Shadow, she did literally nothing. Her entire
editing process consisted of telling me that the book was good to go as submitted. The published book is nearly word-for-word identical to my submitted manuscript, so much so that we were later able to create the ebook from the unedited submission.

It is true, for example, that Rolf Nelson takes a uniquely creative approach to verb tenses and punctuation, but it is very, very far from the truth to claim that I let them all stand. Why do we publish him, then? Because Rolf is an excellent storyteller, and if you are more interested in grammar than story and characterization, then you are not part of Castalia House’s target market. Literary style is only one of the four major aspects of writing; one of the reasons that Castalia House exists is because the mainstream publishing houses have become overly obsessed with style and ideology at the expense of story, characters, and ideas.

And I will go so far as to say this: I am a much better editor than whoever is supposed to be editing George RR Martin’s books. Had I been the editor, A Dance with Dragons would have been 700 pages shorter and it would have been considerably more enjoyable.

UPDATE: It appears my surmise about the extent to which Mr. Wright’s books were edited at Tor Books was correct, as per L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright

Just in case anyone wondered: John has tremendous respect for Mr. Hartwell, whom he admired, appreciated working with, and liked as a person. But Mr. Hartwell almost never made any changes to John’s manuscripts.

Mailvox: a brief lesson in mainstream publishing

Dave doesn’t understand how publishing works:

Why didn’t those same gatekeepers that kept your books from being published disallow the contract offer from the start? How dysfunctional are these publishers that one entity signs you to a book contract but another doesn’t allow anything to be published. Did they sign you with the intention to convince you to write something that would be acceptable to the gatekeepers?

  1. Because they didn’t know about it.
  2. More dysfunctional than you would believe. 
  3. No.

It’s pretty simple. Editors have a good deal of leeway. The vice-presidents, vice-publishers, and marketing executives very seldom know much about the books that are being signed. They won’t have seen the book because it hasn’t been written yet, so all they know is what the editor, who is the internal champion of the author and the book, tells them.

The usual process was this:

  • Editor runs across one of my books or the blog.
  • Editor reads the book, reads a little of the blog, and contacts me.
  • At editor’s request, I come up with a book concept.
  • Editor likes concept, offers book deal.
  • Book deal proceeds, up to and including contract signing.
  • Female director of marketing is asked for input, googles me, throws hissy fit and insists that the project be canceled due to my being “too controversial”.

After this happened for the third time in a row, I stopped talking to mainstream publishers. When I am approached by an editor – which has mostly stopped now that they are all familiar with Castalia House – I just tell them that I am not interested in mainstream publication. For me, at any rate, it’s a complete waste of time, especially since the rising percentage of SJWs at the editorial level means that the number of left-wing gatekeepers is increasing.

And I suspect most authors who lean to the right are gradually going to come to reach the same conclusion that Mr. Cole and I have, especially as the bookstores continue to die off.

The SF gatekeepers strike again

Both Sarah Hoyt and I have previously written about the ideological gatekeepers in publishing, a situation that has persisted for at least 20 years and has continually gotten worse over time. The SJWs in science fiction deny it,of course, and they’ve been able to get away with doing so because most authors are afraid to talk for fear of their careers being destroyed.

But the ability to publish independently is eliminating that fear:

I launched a book this week and I went Indie with it. Indie means I released it on Amazon via Kindle Direct Publishing. I had to. My Publisher, HarperVoyager, refused to publish it because of some of the ideas I wrote about in it. In other words, they were attempting to effectively ban a book because they felt the ideas and concepts I was writing about were dangerous and more importantly, not in keeping with their philosophical ideals. They felt my ideas weren’t socially acceptable and were “guaranteed to lose fifty percent of my audience” as related back to me by my agent. But more importantly… they were “deeply offended”….

apparently advancing the thought that a brand new life form might see
us, humanity, as dangerous because we terminate our young, apparently…
that’s a ThoughtCrime most heinous over at Harper Collins. Even for one
tiny little chapter.

Here’s what happened next. I was not given notes as writers are
typically given during the editorial process. I was told by my agent
that my editor was upset and “deeply offended” that I had even dared
advanced this idea. As though I had no right to have such a thought or
even game the idea within a science fiction universe. I was immediately
removed from the publication schedule which as far as I know is odd and
unprecedented, especially for an author who has had both critical and
commercial success. This, being removed from the production schedule,
happened before my agent had even communicated the editor’s demand that I
immediately change the offending chapter to something more “socially”
(read “progressive”) acceptable. That seemed odd. How could they
possibly have known that I would or would not change it? It seems
reasonable to ask first. And stating that I would lose fifty percent of
my readers if I wrote what I wrote, well, they never seem to mind, or
worry about losing readers, when other writers publish their
progressive-oriented personal agendas on modern morality when they’re on
the “right side” of history regarding the anti-religion, gender and
sexuality issues.

They don’t worry about those issues because they’re
deemed important, especially when they’re ham-handedly jammed into the
framework of the story. They must deem it a public service, especially
if there is a corresponding Social Justice outcry. It’s for the “greater
good” and the critics are just bigots anyways. Isn’t that what they
always say? That anyone else who doesn’t think the way they do is just a
bigot and a phobic of some kind. What a boorish way to dismiss a
counter-viewpoint. Thinking like that made the concentration camps
possible. So, maybe they were so upset by what I’d written they forgot
to be professional? They merely demanded that I rewrite that chapter not
because it was poorly written, or, not supportive of the arc of the
novel. No, they demanded it be struck from the record because they hate
the idea I’d advanced. They demanded it be deleted without discussion.
They felt it was for… the “greater good.” That is censorship, and a
violation of everyone’s right to free speech. They demanded it be so or
else… I wouldn’t be published.

That’s how they threatened a writer with a
signed contract.

I refused.
I am a writer.
No. One. Will Ever. Bully. Me.
Ever.

I’ve had four – FOUR – book contracts either paid off or canceled myself because a gatekeeper inside the publishing house disliked the ideological content of a book that the editor had wanted to sign. In fairness, this hasn’t always been an SJW gatekeeper, as Media Whores was killed by a conservative publishing house after they learned that I was not solely targeting the left-wing media whores, but had written a chapter on Bill O’Reilly.

But in three out of the four cases, it was an SJW playing thought police. Publishing, as an industry, has largely been converged, which is why so much of it is so unreadable these days. They are genuinely less interested in selling books and making money than advancing their social justice cause.

The shortchanging of House Hufflepuff

In which one of the non-quidditch related shortcomings of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series is explained:

    For instance, Slytherin
    Took only pure-blood wizards
    Of great cunning, just like him,
    And those of sharpest mind
    Were taught by Ravenclaw
    While the bravest and the boldest
    Went to daring Gryffindor.
    Good Hufflepuff, she took the rest,
    And taught them all she knew,
    Thus the Houses and their founders
    Retained friendships firm and true.
…

“She took the rest”

“She took the rest”

Okay. So maybe Hufflepuff doesn’t pick students with dependable, useful, non-flashy but underrated qualities. Apparently, Hufflepuff just takes the rejects.

Yeah.

We’ve hit, by the way, on the biggest flaw of Rowling’s House system. She pays lip service to people overcoming the expectations set by the house they’re sorted in, but in reality characters who are part of Slytherin are evil, characters who are in Gryffindor are good, and the middle two houses don’t matter. Rowling at least has the decency to add in Luna Lovegood, a Ravenclaw and one of the series’ most interesting and beloved characters, but in Hufflepuff…well, there’s Tonks. Except that we’re never actually told Tonks is a Hufflepuff until after the series is over. And let’s not even get into all of the problems with Rowling’s portrayal of Slytherin House.

I could never figure out what Hermione was doing in Gryffindor when she was an obvious Ravensclaw. I mean, being intelligent and studious to the point of being annoying about it was the primary aspect of her personality.

But as I pointed out many years ago, Rowling isn’t any good with coherent plots or worldbuilding; nearly everything about Harry Potter is entirely nonsensical. What she’s good at is creating vivid characters and appealing to the lowest common denominator in children. And that, quite frankly, is a considerably more valuable skill than mere logic or literary talent.

Mailvox: leadership is socio-sexual

CD wonders about how socio-sexuality relates to politics:

I read an interesting article recently. It was in Politico, but the basis seems sound)

Putting that together with the various “game” categories you use, it looks to me like there may be a built-in dynamic for people.  When things get really bad, the deltas naturally turn to an alpha who seems to have the right ideas.  It looks like that may have been triggered in the US.

On a slightly different topic, I have been trying to determine the relative percentages of deltas, betas, and alphas.  By gender, since I think the percentages differ.  (I ignore sigmas, since the percentage is so low, and gammas since — who cares?)  I have some rough numbers from personal experience, but I haven’t been able to find any research which sheds light on this.  Are you aware of any?

There is no way that socio-sexuality doesn’t affect politics. It affects every aspect of human endeavor, and it is a much more reliable predictive model than nearly any form of psychology I’ve ever encountered.

But you can’t ignore Gammas, in fact, I have constructed a literary theory of socio-sexuality which Delta Man’s has applied to the Gammas that explains a considerable amount of how science fiction has devolved over the years.

As for research, considering that I expanded the concept and articulated some of the various socio-sexual ranks, I can say with certainty that absolutely zero academic research on the topic has been done. But there will be, because it actually works, not only to explain, but predict.

I’ll be posting it at Alpha Game later this week, but it was remarkable how much Delta Man’s Gamma model correctly anticipated Naomi Novik’s book Uprooted, which is one of the leading contenders for this year’s Hugo Best Novel. Now, Novik is a woman, not a Gamma, but either what applies to Gammas can be applied to women or Novik is following the Gamma lead in her books.

Of course, she’s also married to a writer, so… regardless, it is really remarkable how the model can be used to correctly predict not only the behavior, but even the hair color, of the women encountered by the male protagonist.

Traffic report 2015

The growth in site traffic this year was more than expected, as a surprising number of people initially stopped by to see what was going on with the Hugo Awards in August and then stuck around for the remainder of the year. Last year we saw a single 1.5-million pageview month; this year we had 10 in a row. All of the growth was at VP, as AG was pretty flat due to my sporadic posting there. But as was the case last year, 2015 finished very strong; December was not only up 30 percent over last December, but was the second-most-highly-trafficked month of the year.

In 2015, Vox Popoli had 16,211,875 pageviews and Alpha Game 4,565,094 for a total of 20,776,969 Google pageviews. The blogs are now running at a average rate of 56,923 daily pageviews. And yes, I do find it amusing that the blogs are now seeing considerably more genuine traffic than the “extraordinary amount” a certain SF blogger once lied about having. As for the running annual totals, they are as follows:

2008: 3,496,757
2009: 4,414,801
2010: 4,827,183
2011: 5,969,066
2012: 7,774,074
2013: 13,111,695
2014: 15,693,622
2015: 20,776,969

Thank you all for the part you have played in making that happen. However, there are some more important numbers that merit mention. 2015 ended with 465 Vile Faceless Minions pledging their mindless obedience to the Supreme Dark Lord and preparing for battle in 2016. Expect heavier use this year, VFM, as the SJWs react to our media offensive in a variety of means both fair and foul.

On Twitter, I ended the year with 6,230 followers and 14.628 million impressions for 2015. Not bad, but I can clearly put in a little more effort on that front.

Castalia House grew from 21 books published to 37, including 5 in print and 1 in audiobook. Book sales increased 145 percent and no less than six category bestsellers were published. We also added three editors, an Editor-at-Large, an Audio Editor, and a Blog Editor; see the Castalia blog later today for more details there. Speaking of the Audio Editor, the audiobook for Cuckservative is now available on Audible and Amazon, and is already one of the top 50 Philosophy audiobooks. We expect even faster growth for Castalia in 2016 with the release of upcoming books such as Riding the Red Horse Vol. 2 by Tom Kratman and Vox Day, Iron Chamber of Memory by John C. Wright, Clio and Me by Martin van Creveld, Do Buddhas Dream of Enlightened Sheep by Josh Young, and There Will Be War Vol. XI by Jerry Pournelle, among others.

And yes, one of those others will be A Sea of Skulls.

Thank you for your interest, even if it is no more than morbid
curiosity, thank you for your support, and while 2015 was certainly intriguing, I believe 2016 is going to be absolutely extraordinary.

Advice for the would-be blogger

Mike Cernovich offers it:

People didn’t start blogs to win fame or fortune. People wrote because they thought they had something to say, and it was fun.

Or people started blogging in hopes of getting a book deal. Before self-publishing, people actually sat around waiting to be discovered! Or they’d pitch book ideas to publishing houses, which are staffed by 22-year-old Women’s Studies majors.

Now everyone wants to write for one hour a day and earn millions.

When you write for fame or fortune, it shows in your writing. Every post has the, “Please pay attention to me and buy my stuff and hire me” tone to it.

It’s a hard tone to explain, although Aristotle wrote about ethos in Rhetoric.

I write because it’s fun. Even though it’s how I learn my living, this website is the time of my life.

There’s not a day where I have anything approaching writer’s block. How could I? This is a blast!

Blogging was a conversation.

No one ripped off each other’s articles. Not giving attribution – called a “hat tip” – to someone was seen as unethical and would lead to ostracizing.

If someone wrote something interesting, you’d quote what he said, add your comments, and join the conversation.

Today people steal concepts and re-write entire articles.

Shorter version: write because you enjoy the process and because you actually have something different to say. Don’t do it for the attention. Don’t do it for the money. Don’t do it because you like what you perceive as the lifestyle. Don’t do it because you like the image. Especially don’t do it because you think it is some sort of get-rich-quick scheme. It’s not. It’s the exact opposite due to the supply-and-demand curve; there are more people who want to write and are able to publish than ever before, combined with fewer people who read and buy books than there have been in decades. Writing is a hobby, not a profession, a career, or a business.

If you don’t have anything to say that isn’t already being said, don’t bother. If you’re just looking to express yourself, that’s what Pinterest and Twitter are for. If you’re just looking for attention, Tumblr and Facebook will suffice.

But if you do have something to say, why should you listen to Mike? Because of what he has done by himself, without the benefit of a mainstream publisher pushing his books into the distribution channel or striking marketing deals with various booksellers. What he has done is not at all common. The average U.S. nonfiction book is now selling less than 250 copies per year. Less than 5 percent of books sell more than 5,000 copies. He is an extreme outlier.

Gorilla Mindset has sold 15,164 copies. I sell on average 70 copies per day.

Essays on Embracing Masculinity has sold 1,500 copies. I sell on average 8 copies per day.

Juice Power has sold 1,500 or so copies. Juice Power sells a copy or so a day.

Last Man Standing will outsell Gorilla Mindset, and comes out in early 2016.
I would be remiss if I failed to mention that Castalia House will have the privilege of publishing Last Man Standing.

Cuckservative: initial responses

The sales have been exceptional. The reviews have been excellent, by which I don’t mean that they said the book is great, although they mostly do, but in their attention to detail and their substance. Sadly, some observers are just not taking it well.

Phil Sandifer ‏@PhilSandifer
Man, Vox Day must be spending an awful lot of his daddy’s money to drive up his new book’s Amazon ranking this high.

To which there can really only be one response.

Otherwise, the usual SJWs have been stunned into silence; the observable fact that I not only have considerably more support than they do, but actually happen to be in harmony with the popular zeitgeist at the moment is rather more than they are equipped to rationally process. The success of SJWs Always Lie was bad enough, as far as they were concerned, but to follow it up with an even bigger success of broader appeal is simply beyond imagining.

There has been only one real criticism aimed at the book to date, namely, the absence of footnotes. It’s a legitimate point, and I will address it, first as if I were Red Eagle, and second in my own inimitable fashion.

Cuckservative makes a strong rhetorical appeal to defend historic America, but its weak point is that you have to read it as an appeal addressed to you, the reader. It’s not factual ammunition for you, the already-convinced reader, to use in a debate with the unconvinced, because the authors have omitted footnotes. Cuckservative uses a lot of facts, and Vox Day has said on his blog that he’s got solid sources for everything, and that omitting references gives critics less to attack. That’s fine if you believe he’s not bluffing, and I do; but “one of the authors says he has a source for that, but he won’t say what it is” doesn’t fly in a serious argument.

Ann Coulter’s Adios America will supply facts by the ton when it comes out on Kindle. Meanwhile Cuckservative is the best current statement of the militant right-wing case against mass immigration and against ineffective “respectable” conservative politics regarding it.

Imagine, if you will, that you are a married man. You’ve worked a long day. You’re tired and you’re not in the mood for explaining yourself or getting into an argument with your wife, so when she asks you if you want Chinese for dinner, you have two choices. Either A) you simply say no, or B) you tell her no and you explain why.

If you say no, that ends the debate. Perhaps she suggests something else, perhaps you do, either way, there is no need for discussion. But if you go with option B), you have given her the opening to take issue with why your position is incorrect and to attempt to convince you that you really do want Chinese. Whether she manages to convince you or not, you’re in for an argument, and most likely, you’ll end up eating Chinese even though you didn’t want to.

Now, in case the analogy has escaped you, the reasons for not wanting Chinese food are the footnotes and the wife is the critics. Here endeth the lesson.

From my perspective, books are discourse. I expect and anticipate criticism both fair and foul. I remember when Ann Coulter was absolutely pilloried for having endnotes rather than footnotes. I also know that not having footnotes allows me, or the Cuckservative reader, to call out the critic who attempts to cast doubt on them.

The correct response to the critic who claims that something in Cuckservative is wrong is to ask him what the correct answer is. If he wishes to deny that the Danish army’s measured average IQ has fallen by 1.5 points, ask him for the correct delta. Ask him if it has risen, fallen, or stayed the same. He will not be able to do so, thereby discrediting himself and revealing that he is not an honest interlocutor.

The only people who actually need the footnotes are those who are attempting to undermine the arguments presented in the book by disqualifying the source data. Red Eagle and I simply made their task more difficult by denying it to them. If you want to cite a source, then cite our book. That is sufficient.

But perhaps my chief reason for not providing my sources, which are, of course, impeccable, is my experience with TIA. Simply because I cited my source, many people who read the book took my original arguments and credited them to the source, who, ironically enough, made precisely the opposite argument in the face of the data they had collected.

For much of the world before the 17th century, these “reasons” for war were explained, and justified, at least for the participants, by religion.
– The Encyclopedia of Wars, p. xxii

No, they really weren’t. I make mistakes, but I seldom make the same mistake twice.

UPDATE: My co-author speaks for himself:

This isn’t an academic treatise, it isn’t a book report we’re submitting for approval and critique by authority, and it isn’t a defensive, plaintive rearguard work in the cuckservative style.

We’re on the attack. Let the lefties and cuckservatives be on the defense. Let them impotently quibble and whine about us failing to cite our sources. Let them do their own homework if they want to argue or nitpick, and let them be the ones who try to qualify themselves.

Preach, preacher!

Why new readers don’t read old authors

John C. Wright explains why in the midst of delving into literary aelvipology.

We are in the Dark Ages, and the darkness influences all things in society, including speculative literature. I mean the term not as an exaggeration or a metaphor: the technological products of our enlightened forefathers spring from the worldview which says science is a proper way to discover the mind of God by studying His works. Eliminating that God from one’s worldview eventually eliminates the respect for human life, free thought, and reason in law and custom which are necessary precursors to scientific endeavors, and eliminating science eliminates technology. Once the lamps go out, the darkness is everywhere, even in the little corners of society where children read books about spacerockets or elves.

The moderns have been taught to hate and loath their own country, their ancestors, their parents, and been told everything written before the current day is racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, transcismophobic, and pure evil. These nutbags think that their own standard bearers of the Progressive movement, the founders of their genre, were not Progressives like themselves.

One need only hear sexual libertarian and radical egalitarian nut Bob Heinlein being excoriated as a member of the misogynist phallocratic patriarchy to realize how far off the edge of the world the lunatics have sailed the ship of fools.

This is not some lunatic fringe belief. It is lunacy, of course, but not fringe. It is mainstream. The core institutions and standard bearers of Science Fiction, the largest publishers, the most prestigious awards, our once-respected guild the SFWA, the oldest and most famous magazine: they all buy into the narrative and all support the narrative with a singleminded fury that is Bolshevik in its vehemence, patience, and pettiness.

Progressives hate the past and seek forever to blacken, demean, and obliterate it. Anyone reading the older books would see immediately that the modern works are only merely equal, not as innovative, and that the modern award-winning works are notably inferior.

The notion of progress is the notion that the past is bad and the present is better and the future will be better yet. If you read old books and find that they are either slightly better or remarkably better than modern offerings, you see a decline, not a progress,  and the foundation of progressivism, is overthrown.

The reader will probably recognize that while the elves of Selenoth are a blend of Tolkienian and Longaevian, the Faeries of the Eternal Warriors trilogy are explicitly Longaevian.

The great ones know

A fascinating article by the great Japanese writer Haruki Murakami about when he decided to become a novelist and how he developed his unique style:

To tell the truth, although I was reading all kinds of stuff, my
favourites being 19th-century Russian novels and American hard-boiled
detective stories, I had never taken a serious look at contemporary
Japanese fiction. Thus I had no idea what kind of Japanese novels were
being read at the time, or how I should write fiction in the Japanese
language.

For several months, I operated on pure guesswork,
adopting what seemed to be a likely style and running with it. When I
read through the result, though, I was far from impressed. It seemed to
fulfil the formal requirements of a novel, but it was somewhat boring,
and the book as a whole left me cold. If that’s the way the author
feels, I thought, a reader’s reaction will probably be even more
negative. Looks like I just don’t have what it takes, I thought
dejectedly. Under normal circumstances, it would have ended there – I
would have walked away. But the epiphany I had received on Jingu
Stadium’s grassy slope was still clearly etched in my mind.

In
retrospect, it was only natural that I was unable to produce a good
novel. It was a big mistake to assume that a guy like me who had never
written anything in his life could spin something brilliant right off
the bat. I was trying to accomplish the impossible. Give up trying to
write something sophisticated, I told myself. Forget all those
prescriptive ideas about “the novel” and “literature” and set down your
feelings and thoughts as they come to you, freely, in a way that you
like.

While it was easy to talk about setting down one’s impressions freely, doing it wasn’t all that simple. For a sheer beginner like myself it was especially hard. To make a fresh start, the first thing I had to do was get rid of my stack of manuscript paper and my fountain pen. As long as they were sitting in front of me, what I was doing felt like “literature”. In their place, I pulled out my old Olivetti typewriter from the closet. Then, as an experiment, I decided to write the opening of my novel in English. Since I was willing to try anything, I figured, why not give that a shot?

Needless to say, my ability in English composition didn’t amount to much. My vocabulary was severely limited, as was my command of English syntax. I could only write in simple, short sentences. Which meant that, however complex and numerous the thoughts running around my head might be, I couldn’t even attempt to set them down as they came to me. The language had to be simple, my ideas expressed in an easy-to-understand way, the descriptions stripped of all extraneous fat, the form made compact, and everything arranged to fit a container of limited size. The result was a rough, uncultivated kind of prose. As I struggled to express myself in that fashion, however, step by step, a distinctive rhythm began to take shape.

Since I was born and raised in Japan, the vocabulary and patterns of the Japanese language had filled the system that was me to bursting, like a barn crammed with livestock. When I sought to put my thoughts and feelings into words, those animals began to mill about, and the system crashed. Writing in a foreign language, with all the limitations that entailed, removed this obstacle. It also led me to discover that 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 skilful manner. To sum up, I learnt that there was no need for a lot of difficult words – I didn’t have to try to impress people with beautiful turns of phrase.

I found this fascinating, because as you may recall, I studied Japanese, and although I don’t speak it anymore, I retain enough of a sense of it that Murakami’s writing has never struck me as “translated” in the same sense that other Japanese writers do. I’d always just assumed that he had a better translator, but apparently it is the English structural influence that he imposes on his Japanese style that creates that effect.

One Murakami fan has observed: “When you read Murakami in Japanese, it’s almost like he’s translating his own writing from English.”

In any event, if you haven’t read Murakami, he’s well worth reading. He tends to stick to the same themes and Japanese fatalism runs through all of his works, but he always presents an interesting variation on those themes. My favorite Murakami novel is A Wild Sheep Chase. And I found it unsurprising to observe that the great ones usually recognize their own talent before others do:

That’s when it hit me. I was going to win the prize. And I was going to
go on to become a novelist who would enjoy some degree of success. It
was an audacious presumption, but I was sure at that moment that it
would happen. Completely sure. Not in a theoretical way but directly and
intuitively.

That’s why I always laugh at those who claim that if someone openly states that they are X, it should be taken as evidence to the contrary. That’s totally false. From Ruth to Jordan, from Tolstoy to Murakami, the great ones always know it and they are not at all surprised by their own success. They expect it.