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

From Not Always So, by Shunryu Suzuki, Everyday Life is Like a Movie:

When you are practicing, you realize that your mind is like a screen. If the screen is colorful, colorful enough to attract people, then it will not serve its purpose. So to have a screen which is not colorful – to have a pure, plain white screen – is the most important point. But most people are not interested in a pure white screen.

Do you start with a blank screen? Or is it so colorful and cluttered that any attempt to put something new on it just gets lost in the jumble?

Keith Johnstone from his book Impro. I highly recommend it.

Once we believe that art is self-expression, then the individual can be criticized not only for his skill or lack of skill, but simply for being what he is.

Schiller wrote of a ‘watcher at the gates of the mind’, who examines ideas too closely. He said that in the case of the creative mind ‘the intellect has withdrawn its watcher from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it review and inspect the multitude.’ He said that uncreative people ‘are ashamed of the momentary passing madness which is found in all real creators… regarded in isolation, an idea may be quite insignificant, and venturesome in the extreme, but it may acquire importance from an idea that follows it; perhaps in collation with other ideas which seem equally absurd, it may be capable of furnishing a very serviceable link.’

My teachers had the opposite theory. They wanted me to reject and discriminate, believing that the best artist was the one who made the most elegant choices. They analyzed poems to show how difficult ‘real’ writing was, and they taught that I should always know where the writing was taking me, and that I should search for better and better ideas. They spoke as if an image like ‘the multitudinous seas incarnadine’ could have been worked out like the clue to a crossword puzzle. Their idea of the ‘correct’ choice was the one anyone would have made if he had thought about it long enough.

I now feel that imagining should be as effortless as perceiving.

Ironically, Ed Wood wrote a book on how to be a successful writer in Hollywood. Here are a few select quotes from Ed Wood on writing.

So you want to be a writer? OK. Be one.

The main idea is to keep writing. No matter what it is. Keep at it because even if your story gets worse, you will be getting better. You’ll sit and dream most of the time, but you must first conquer the big white glob with the typewriter imprints.

It’s terrible to me to hear someone say about someone else’s work, “Ahh, that stinks!” Yet the critic probably couldn’t ink his way out of a paper bag. You put it on paper. Good, bad, or indifferent. At least you had the guts to put it there.

Ed Wood, Jr.

Hollywood Rat Race

From Film Threat:

“I really believe there’s, like, an ocean of ideas. And all of the ideas are sitting there. They bob up from time to time and come into your conscious mind and you know them. When a good idea bobs up, it really smacks you. It’s like a piece of electricity and you see the whole thing and you feel it and you know what to do. It all comes with the idea.”

I finished Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity David Lynch’s book on creativity. Except for the occasional evangelizing for Transcendental Meditation, it’s a good, short read.