One Day At A Time: Murakami's Running, Quitting Smoking and Daily Writing Routine

Haruki Murakami's daily routine is famous for a reason: it is the quiet engine behind decades of novels. Running, early mornings, and long hours at the desk have shaped his life as a writer, and the story starts with a pack of cigarettes. Here is how the habits that built his career came about, and what we can borrow from them.

From three packs a day to ten kilometres

In his thirties, Murakami was a heavy smoker. He was throwing out around three packs a day, his nails and fingertips were stained yellow, and he smelled of smoke. He had picked up the habit to pass the time while running his jazz bar, Peter Cat (you can read how that chapter ended in our post on his jazz bar days).

Then he decided to write a novel, and he wanted to keep that ability going for the long haul. That meant paying attention to his health. Murakami describes himself as a mesomorph, someone who gains weight easily, and his goal was to lean up. So he quit smoking cold turkey and started running, quite recklessly at first. Before long he was covering ten kilometres a day, averaging about sixty kilometres a week. Forty years later, he is still at it.

What running gave his writing

Running taught Murakami about himself. The discipline and repetition that powered his new habit also fed his writing, and as the habits built on each other, the creative and rhythmic side of his prose grew stronger. You can see that change across the span of his books over the years.

A typical working day

Murakami has described his routine in simple terms: get up early, make coffee, and face the desk for four to five hours. If he writes twenty manuscript pages a day, that adds up to six hundred a month. By his account, the first draft of Kafka on the Shore came to around 3,600 pages, and he lost count of how many times it was revised. Once a book is finished and published, he says, he doesn't look back at it. He did his best, and he knows he couldn't improve it by rewriting.

Talent, concentration and persistence

Murakami believes a novelist needs three things: talent, concentration, and persistence. Some people treat talent as a matter of the luck we are born with, but concentration and persistence can be trained through inner resolve. Most of us, he suggests, feel the urge to give something up once we get bored with it, and we often explain it away with "I'm just lazy." Our biggest enemy, in other words, is ourselves. His answer is to let those whims pass and keep going, day in and day out. As he puts it:

"I write little by little every day, without hope or despair."

He also says that his good fortune, starting with that random decision to write a novel, didn't arrive as a "free ticket." Luck, he believes, is not something you can simply hold on to. It has to be managed and built up steadily, and that is what makes the difference.

Small habits, big changes

This is the part we find most encouraging. We don't need to run like Murakami to learn from him. What matters is the result of doing a small thing steadily. After six months, a year, three years, ten, you will definitely see a change. It is fine to miss a day because you are sick. What matters is getting back to it.

So if you have been waiting for the right moment to start something, consider this your nudge. Get out of your head, begin, be patient, and keep at it. A different life is built that way, one day at a time.

What changes are you thinking of making, and what is your motivation? Share it with us below.