Parallel Habits: Running and Writing

In his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami dabbles in a bit of philosophy, but mostly he writes about his personal experiences with training and racing. Not being a runner, I read this book because Murakami is my newest literary love. 

My other current love, Joyce Carol Oates, is also a runner. I came across an essay of hers in her collection, The Faith of a Writer. This essay was published by the New York Times as To Invigorate Literary Mind, Start Moving Literary Feet... It is an odd coincidence that the two novelists I most admire (at this moment) are the only two popular novelists who have published essays on running and writing.

In her essay JCO writes, “If writing involves punishment, at least for some of us, the act of running even in adulthood can evoke painful memories of having been, long ago, as children, chased by tormentors. (Is there any adult who hasn’t such memories? Are there any adult women who have not been, in one way or another, sexually molested or threatened?)” So Joyce is fleeing something from her past? I think that is apparent in her work, which often explores trauma.

If Murakami is trying to abscond from his past, he isn’t talking about it. He appears to be racing towards something, namely his goals as a marathon runner and triathlete. He’s running for the sake of running, to keep himself in shape, and for solitude. He is also trying to fortify his body against toxins. He writes:

Basically I agree with the view that writing novels is an unhealthy type of work. When we set off to write a novel, when we use writing to create a story, like it or not a kind of toxin that lies deep down in all humanity rises to the surface. All writers have to come face-to-face with this toxin and, aware of the danger involved, discover a way to deal with it, because otherwise no creative activity in the real sense can take place.

Wow. What? 

This idea is not entirely new, but when writers talk about it they often make jokes, like:

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed.”- Ernest Hemingway“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” – E.L Doctorow“Being an author is being in charge of your own personal insane asylum.” – Terri Guillemets“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” – Ray Bradbury

or, more seriously:

“Writing is a struggle against silence.” – Carlos Fuentes“Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.” – Franz Kafka“If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.” – Lord Byron“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” – George Orwell

There is precedent for this idea that writing is toxic. Further evidence is shown in the many good artistic men and women who suffered so much that they took their own lives, or abused drugs and alcohol until those substances relieved them of the burden.

Why is writing toxic? No one can or will say. Is it that we are not meant to look so closely at human behavior? Is it the strange ambiguity of human motivation, refusing clarity, which drives writers mad? Is it the act of thinking, habitually, for long periods that is incongruent with living? Or is it the toxin which creates the writer?

Regardless of the origin of this toxin, I think we can agree that it exists for some, if not all, writers. Running rhythmically pounds out these ideas. It creates a meditative state where a body can choose to empty the mind or work thoughts out. Murakami tries to empty his mind. He says “I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it another way: I run in order to acquire a void.” While Oates writes, “The structural problems I set for myself in writing, in a long, snarled, frustrating and sometimes despairing morning of work, for instance, I can usually unsnarl by running in the afternoon. On days when I can’t run, I don’t feel “myself” and whoever the “self” is I do feel, I don’t like nearly as much as the other. And the writing remains snarled in endless revisions.” 

These two amazing contemporary authors have different approaches to running and writing. Though they are also similar. They are both masters of the craft. They write in the morning and run in the afternoon, every day if possible. They have formed habits around both activities. It occurs to me that it may be the forming of habits that is integral to the writing life.

Of course we all know we need to sit down and write every day. We know that we need to have scheduled writing time. Even though we don’t all do it, we know that we need to make writing a habit in order to be successful. Every “how to” on writing agrees on that point. 

Interestingly, it seems that writers also need to have a parallel habit to offset all the thinking that one must drudge through in order to write. Even if that habit just facilitates another venue in which to think about writing, as with Joyce Carol Oates. Though some writers, like Murakami, seek to escape all that thinking through activity. Still others escape through drugs and alcohol. Then there are those smoking writers who can perform both habits at once, wallowing in their thinking as they breath in toxins which feed the writing toxins already at work. My contemporary loves chose running as their parallel habit. I think their choice has produced epiphanous results.