This is day two, and I have no idea where to start. So I’m going to start by writing about writing, or, more accurately, writing about not knowing what to write.
I recently read a memoir written by Haruki Murakami entitled What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. He is one of my favorite novelists, and this was the first time I’ve read his non-fiction.
Murakami started writing when he was about 30 years old, right around when he started to run habitually. Since then he has run many many marathons and triathlons, and has written many novels. He sort of just came to the conclusion one day, that he wanted to write a novel, that he could write a novel. Reading this both humbled and inspired me—he had no formal education in creative writing, but instead just 30 years of life, and the conviction that he could do it, to inform him.
I’m almost 23. I’ve noticed myself using my age as a marker of my ability, of where I should or shouldn’t be, what I should and shouldn’t have done already. I’m not Murakami. I am not Hemingway. But by reading their thoughts I have picked up slices of their attitude, perspectives I can’t unread that slowly bleed into my own words. Francine Prose writes about this process in her book Reading like a Writer. Prose says that we learn how to write from the writers we read. Whether by osmosis or by focused, intentional observation of their techniques and style, we pick up where they leave off.
If someone paid me to, I don’t think I could point to exactly where in my writing I invoke the voices of the writers I’ve read. Well, maybe I could, but it would take countless hours looking back and forth, reading my work, line by line, side by side with the dozens of authors I’ve been graced with knowing. And I really don’t care what is wholly me and what came as a result of me reading. I hope more of the latter is the case, for then my writing would carry with it the brilliance of others’ experiences.
So with that in mind, I look forward to reading more than I write, to finishing Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke and letting him influence my own sentences. Like Prose did, I too hope that he, and everyone else I read and love (and even sometimes dislike), adds something to my writing. I don’t want to be isolated from thoughts that are not mine.