Haruki Murakami's Writing Routine

Haruki Murakami's daily routine, when he's working on a novel, is the most rigid one in this archive, and probably the most physical. He gets up at four in the morning. He writes for five or six hours, producing about ten pages of his manuscript paper, which works out to around four thousand words. Then he stops writing for the day, no matter how the session went, and goes outside to run ten kilometers or swim fifteen hundred meters. After that he reads, listens to records, has dinner, and is in bed by nine. The next morning he gets up at four and does the same day again. He keeps this up for the entire duration of a novel, sometimes a year or more, without breaking the pattern.

Murakami talks about this routine the way an athlete talks about training. He isn't trying to coax inspiration out of hiding. He's trying to put his body and mind into a state where the long, slow work of writing a six-hundred-page novel becomes physically possible, the way an ultramarathoner trains for a hundred-mile race. The writing and the running are two parts of the same project, which is endurance.

The Same Day, Every Day

The first thing to understand about Murakami's routine is that it's a single repeating day, not a series of habits stacked together. He talked about this in his 2004 Paris Review interview with John Wray, and he wrote about it at length in his 2007 memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. The routine has nothing to do with productivity in the modern sense. The point is putting himself into a state of mind that can produce a long, complicated novel without falling apart somewhere in the middle.

The rigidity is the point. Murakami says that when he's deep into a book, the sameness of each day is what allows him to access the deeper layers of his imagination. He compares it to going down into a basement underneath a basement: you can't reach the lower room while your conscious mind is busy negotiating with the world. The repeated day removes the negotiation. There are no decisions to make. Wake at four, write until ten, run, eat, sleep, repeat. With the surface of the day taken care of, the part of him that produces the strange, dreamlike narratives can come up out of the basement and start working.

This is a different theory of routine than most writers operate from. King uses his routine to make output reliable. Hemingway used his to manage friction. Murakami uses his to alter consciousness. The point of doing the exact same day for a year is that the day stops registering, and what's left is the writer's interior life with nothing in front of it. Anyone who's read his novels can feel the result. The narratives have the unmediated quality of a long dream, and that quality comes partly from a man who has spent twelve months living the same twenty-four hours over and over until the surface of his life dissolved.

Running as Writing

The running isn't a hobby. Murakami started running in 1982, around the time he was finishing his second novel, and he hasn't stopped since. He's run more than thirty marathons. He completed an ultramarathon of sixty-two miles in 1996. He talks about the running and the writing as two halves of the same vocation, and the connection he draws between them is more interesting than the usual exercise-helps-creativity argument.

The connection, in his telling, is endurance. Writing a novel is a physical act sustained over months or years. It demands the body to be capable of sitting still for long periods, the lungs to be capable of slow steady breathing, the back and the eyes to hold up under sustained strain. A novelist who can't sit at a desk for five hours without his body falling apart will have a hard time finishing anything long. Murakami runs to keep the physical instrument capable of doing the work. He's said in interviews that talent matters less than people think and that endurance matters more, and the running is how he trains the part of himself that endurance lives in.

There's also a more direct effect. The hours after the writing session, when he's running, are when the unconscious processing of the morning's work happens. He doesn't think about the novel while he's running. He thinks about nothing in particular, lets his mind wander, and by the time the run is over, the next day's session has often started to take shape on its own. Running gives the unconscious mind a job that occupies the body, which leaves the storytelling part of the brain free to keep working in the background. Most writers I know who run report some version of this. Murakami is the writer who organized his entire life around the observation.

Mesmerizing Yourself

The word Murakami uses for what the routine does to him, in the Paris Review interview, is "mesmerism." He says he keeps the day so identical, for so long, that he hypnotizes himself into the writing state. The repetition becomes the trance. Once he's been doing the same day for a few weeks, the morning session no longer requires any decision or any willpower. He wakes, he sits down, and he's already inside the work, because there's nowhere else for him to be.

I think this is the most psychologically honest thing any famous novelist has said about routine. Most writing advice frames the daily practice as a discipline, something you impose on yourself through force of will, and that framing eventually breaks because willpower runs out. Murakami's frame is different. He treats the routine as a self-induced trance rather than a discipline. You arrange the conditions of your life so the writing becomes the path of least resistance, and after enough repetition the writing happens almost without you. The mesmerism does the work that willpower can't.

The catch is that the mesmerism only works if the routine is genuinely identical, day after day after day. A writer who skips the run on Tuesday, sleeps in on Saturday, and breaks the rhythm to attend a dinner party on Friday will never get into the trance state Murakami is describing. He's clear about this. The routine is non-negotiable for the duration of a novel, and he turns down social invitations, declines interviews, and protects the day like a man protecting a delicate piece of equipment, because he knows how easily the spell breaks.

Bed by Nine

The half of Murakami's routine that nobody copies is the bedtime. He's asleep by nine in the evening, and he stays asleep until four in the morning, which works out to about seven hours of protected sleep. The early bedtime is the load-bearing wall. Without it, the four a.m. wake-up turns into chronic sleep deprivation, and a sleep-deprived novelist can't access the basement-under-the-basement at all. Tired writing is shallow writing. Murakami protects the sleep first, and then everything else in the routine follows.

This is the part of the lifestyle that requires the most social sacrifice. A man who's in bed by nine doesn't go to dinner parties. He doesn't watch late-night television. He doesn't drink much. His evenings are quiet and his social life is correspondingly thin. Murakami has talked about this with a kind of cheerful resignation. The trade is real, and he made it on purpose. The novels are what he gets in return, and to him the trade is obvious.

Most writers who admire Murakami's routine try to copy the four a.m. wake-up without copying the nine p.m. bedtime, and they usually quit within two weeks. The wake-up isn't the discipline. The bedtime is. If you can't get yourself into bed by nine, you have no business getting up at four, because you'll just be a miserable, exhausted version of the person you'd have been at seven anyway. The deeper lesson here, for any writer trying to build a serious daily practice, is that the work is downstream of the sleep. Protect the sleep first. The rest will follow.