Murakami and windows of the past

i started to read “Haruki Murakami and the music of words” - Jay Rubin's book on the author Haruki Murakami. it's both fascinating and humorous. also it includes thoughts on translation – Jay Rubin is the one who translated some of Murakami's book from Japanese to English. the odd thing is that some of the German Murakami books then were coming from this source – translated from English to German, instead directly from Japanese, as there aren't many translators who do this work.

and Murakami: he said that when he started to write his first novel, he started in Japanese. and that got him nowhere. then he wrote the first chapter in English. and that worked. and so, he translated it into Japanese, and moved on from that. the book is great. a mix of biography, the stories he wrote, his thoughts on writing, quotes from him, passages of books.

sitting out there, in the garden, reading, lingering, feeling the restlessness turning into flow, i felt the wish to make a pencil drawing of all the things and projects and people that are part of my days these days: the house here, the garden, 2028, the web world, blueprintreview, my parents, my sister, friends here ... it was good, another way of seeing what i am doing, where i am connected, where my energy goes, where it comes from.

and then found these lines in my horoscope:
“Also you put all the disparate parts of your life together into a complete picture, so that you can understand the whole.”

~~~~

some days later, while sitting there, on my cat place, looking out and seeing the rain start to fall while i read through the next chapter, i had to giggle in surprise, even though i have might read that before in an earlier place of the book: Murakami also did a lot of translations from American to Japanese. one of the authors he translates is John Irving. and another.. Truman Capote.

and another fitting thing – in this chapter, there are some insights into Murakami's way of working. he writes every day. gets up at 4, writes until noon. goes jogging, to keep himself fit. he also does marathons. and he makes an interesting comparison between jogging and writing – with a reference to zen:

“writing is like jogging. i come to a point when i know that i achieved something that until then, i only tried for all the time. it's like moving through a wall. you simply have to slip through it.”

he writes a novel in a year. and then spends another year doing rewrites. some parts he rewrites 10-15 times.

a thought i had about writing myself yesterday:

to write the first chapter,
you sit down and write the first chapter.
then you let what you wrote sink in.
until the time is right..
to sit down and write the first chapter.

step by step. layer by layer.