I love  Haruki Murakami, he is probably my favorite living writer.

He tells a story of being at a baseball game in 1978. He was just sitting back and enjoying the game when someone hit the ball. The sound of the crack of the bat triggered something in his head. “All of a sudden I got the idea I could write: that simple.”

It’s almost as if he can describe a single moment when he had his calling to the creative life. He also describes his creative process in incredible detail. He doesn’t make anything up, he says, he just discovers it.

“That’s the beginning of the story. We have rooms in ourselves. Most of them we have not visited yet. Forgotten rooms. From time to time we can find the passage. We find strange things . . . old phonographs, pictures, books . . . they belong to us, but it is the first time we have found them.”

I thought this was a beautiful metaphor and wanted to share it. It’s like he’s remembering a dream. Discovering is always easier than making something up. The trouble is that you don’t always find what you need or what you want.

Quotes from this article